Slashdot Mirror
Net Phones Taking Off in the Third World
dipfan writes "Internet telephone technology is surging in popularity and starting to make a big dent in telephone revenues in the Third World, for a simple reason: cost. A call from Honduras to the US over the net is just 5 or 10 cents a minute at an internet cafe, compared with $1+ a minute through a telco, reports the Washington Post, which compares the situation to the US where internet telephony "is used mostly by college students and geeks" who have the time and energy to install the software."
That's what I've been saying for years. VoIP, while still definitely in its infancy, is just as much the future undoing of the LD industry as P2P is the undoing of the (current) music industry.
I hope those third world countries really save enough money from these large first world corporations to make a quality lifestyle change. I hope they take this opportunity to manage their own services and dont let USA bully and sanction and threaten their way into corporate control of the new technologies there.
I'm an American but currently live in Mexico. I don't know what you're talking about in terms of "these large first world corporations." If you are implying that American telco companies are robbing the poor in third world countries you are sadly mistaken--at least in Mexico.
Mexico has a terrible telephone monopoly, "Telmex." It historically has terrible quality and their prices are outrageous. It costs about 80 cents per minute for me to call the U.S. but only about 15 or 20 to call from the U.S. to Mexico. And Telmex is entirely a Mexican monopoly.
In fact, a few years ago the phone monopoly was "broken" by the Mexican government and competition was introduced. Both MCI and AT&T entered the market, and we even have competition in local service in many parts of Monterrey. However, Telmex is still the monopoly. Since most people get their phone lines with Telmex they generally get new subscribers to sign-up for their LD service. AT&T and MCI are at a distinct disadvantage and have even considered leaving the Mexican market because Telmex maintains its monopoly in fact, if not in law.
As is usually the case, problems in the third world--political and economic--are NOT the fault of the U.S. or other first-world countries. They are almost always the fault of powers closer to home. In this case, telco providers in Latin America make a killing because they either have a government-mandated monopoly, or the government allows competition but silently supports the original monopoly by not encouraging the competition or forcing the monopoly to act in non-monopolistic ways.
I don't know abotu Africa, but in a lot of developing countries, the state-owned telco monopoly is also the gatekeeper of internet connectivity.
I've had personal experience with the Republic of Palau in the Western Pacific. Palau National Commuinications Corp. owns the phone system, and also runs Palaunet, the only ISP on the island. (Good luck getting another ISP in when PNCC owns the access to the lines.)
Result: internet telephone calls are prohibited on Palaunet. (It's easy-- watch for bi-directional high-bandwitdth traffic, instead of uni-directional. So simultaneously uploading and downloading on a P2P will get your account a once-over, but that's life in the Third World.) Instead, you're forced to pay the egregiously expensive long distance voice rates.
Internet telephony only works if you've got an open communications industry. That's not true in a lot of developing countries, where the Government is footing the bill for all infrastructure, and wants to keep control of it for economic or political reasons.
VoIP termination is certainly illegal. Even though the phone company, who also have a monopoly on bandwidth, make money whatever you do. They're getting local call rates (Billed at $2 an hour inc taxes), bandwidth money from the ISP, and they still don't want to lose the international telephony deals, where they make ridiculous amounts of money.
All over Europe, telcos don't want to lose lucrative internation traffic. Real third world countries (rather than emerging economies) have neither enough bandwidth nor the latency required to provide adequate VoIP anyway.
However bandwidth in Morocco is pretty good. Check out www.tiboo.com for a site hosted in Morocco with high visits and reasonable serving of pages.
Conversion Rate Optimisation French / English consultant