Factors influencing the intention to use VoIP service by consumers in Thailand

Abstract

This paper focuses on investigating what and how technology-specific factors affect consumers' intention to use VoIP services. Finding factors that influence the consumers' perception becomes a hot issue in telecommunication research field especially for VoIP service providers and regulators who have been exploring the various approaches to attract consumers' intention and get they use the services. Attempting to meet a pragmatic need and constituting a challenge to the VoIP service providers and regulators, an exploratory research was undertaken to determine factors based upon the performance concept of Quality of Service in ITU.T E.800 and hot issues that were believed to influence the VoIP service adoption. After extensive exploratory research, two basic quality factors: call quality, connection quality and two additional features: mobility and interoperability; of VoIP service were brought forward to analyze and hypothesized as the antecedents of consumers' perception which subsequently affect an intention to adopt the service. Using `Technology Acceptance Model', the relationship and the magnitude of the affect between the investigative factors and the model's constructs were explicitly demonstrated. The results of the study shown that “Call Quality”, “Connection Quality”, “Interoperability”, and “Mobility”, in sequence, had the most significant effects on intention to use VoIP service. From the proposed model, voice and connection quality could explain the changes of perceived usefulness meanwhile, connection, mobility and interoperability could explain the changes in ease of use perception by 25% and 37%, sequentially. In making the decision, Perceived Usefulness was more important than Perceived Ease of Use. Finally, both users' perception and their attitudes had a strong influence (65%) to users' intention in adopting the VoIP services. Since this work concentrates more directly on the technical attributes of VoIP services rather than broader issues, service providers and regulators can gain more benefit from research results in developing their service and system performance to satisfy large different levels of consumer acceptance.