Ronald Gruia has an intriguing posting about how reliable VOIP needs to be in light of outages at Vonage and 8x8 recently. Does VOIP needs to have five 9s reliability to become a mainstream technology? Or can it thrive with slightly lower quality if it provides users with reduced costs and more features. For the timing being, I suspect bleeding/leading edge consumers - residential more than corporate - will accept less-than-perfect service if they feel they are getting a deal. For the mass market, which has little or no tolerance for technical snafus, less than 100% reliability will stop VOIP from gaining much momentum. This explains why cablecos such as Rogers talk about high-quality service that will be an alternative to what Bell Canada offers. Rogers doesn't talk so much about low prices as its does about doing what Bell already does.