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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."
Be careful of bandwith issues. Bandwidth will always be a problem. No matter how much bandwidth you add, no matter how big you make your highways, no matter how much oil you drill, people will always use as much as you make, even if it means wasting it or creating enough traffic to degrade the whole thing. There is no substitute for efficiency. A better license can compensate for inferior technology to only a minor degree.
With enough upstream bandwidth not only will telcos be hurt but also content providers. You think the artificial 128k limit is there for any other reason? There is decades worth of dark fiber just laying in wait till the telcos and cable companies figure out how to charge you for it. The cost of the future infrastructure is mostly paid for though, they'll be sure to get their money back somehow.
An Education is the Font of All Liberty
I use Yahoo! Messenger to talk to a friend in the US regularly.
I "call" from Denmark, and he is not a college student.
Does that mean Denmark is a third world country or is my friend a geek?
I am not particulary surprised at this.
Sig (appended to the end of comments I post, 54 chars)
And the telephone companies wonder why they are losing customers. They cannot compete against Internet telephony with regard to price. Why the telcos still charge those kind of rates always puzzled me, especially since calls are no routed by computers, at little cost.
This is good for a lot of these countries, since families often have relatives scatteered around the globe, and can use a low cost method to stay in touch (besides written communication, of course).
If I weren't nailed to the penis, I'd be pushing up the daisies!
Speaking from personal experience, my stepfather (in Virginia) uses VoIP to talk to his brother in England. And it's not just because of cost (since both of them are senior-level managers at a telco and a hardware vendor, respectively), but also because most of the time, they're online and in front of their computers anyway.
:wq
1) Decrease the costs of traditional telephone service because they will need to compete with net based services.
2) Increase the costs associated with connections to the internet, because as people use more, the costs for everyone goes up.
I'm not sure which will actually occur, but I bet with services such as this around, you'll see a lot of broadband companies upset because they will want their piece of the action. If the average user starts using his/her connection for phone services too instead of just downloading, why are people so confused when they hear about price increases such as this. To me, it just makes sense, more people will use it for more things==service costs more to provide.
Now I'm just waiting for some level of QOS to implemented world wide for this sort of thing, that way my phone call doesn't wait for your warez. Know what I mean?
Here in India by telco its around 1$/min but on the net it is 14c and prices are dropping and soon may get to about 5c/min, I just hope quality improves :-)
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seems odd that telco's would look at the popularity of "cheap" online alternatives and be upset, as opposed to altering their pricing schemes to be more appealing to "the populaces" ... ... just my two centabos.
When they attempt to shut it down, will anything like Peek-a-booty be able to come to the rescue?
Karma? Karma? I don't need no stinkin' karma.
The Internet has really turned communication on its ear. I have a friend in the Ukraine that I chat with almost daily and every weekend we set up NetMeeting and have a video conference for a couple of hours. It costs neither of us any extra than what we already pay for our internet connection.
In fact the connection we get with NetMeeting is by far more reliable than using phones! Phone calls are (in my experience) about 25% likely to be unusable. They are also quite expensive. Even researching the best "10-10" numbers gets you down to about $0.22US per minute. Calling from Ukraine to the US is extremely expensive.
The Internet has made a lot of things possible that just 5 years ago were out of the hands of most people. The economy of calling that far and that cheap is amazing. When I was a kid I always wanted a video phone. The Web Cam is it.
I think the effect of wireless communication and integrated web communication will stall the growth of physical phone lines and we will start to see them disappear in a few decades. It seems to fit the natural order of how technology progressess. With 3G coming to Sprint PCS phones this summer and all the other carriers later this year and next year I predict that even how we connect to the Internet on a daily basis will change. I see the majority of IP traffic coming from wireless devices rather than desktop computers in 5 years time.
Besides, cell phones are often more widely used in third-world nations. They're only luxury goods if you already have a copper network in place. I'm quite sure that if we had it all do over again here in the States, we'd build cell towers rather than run thousands of miles of wire, just as many people are "building" WiFi LANs in their homes rather than running Cat5 through the walls.
This next song is very sad. Please clap along. -- Robin Zander
Why are we sending cell phones, a luxury product if ever there was one, to Third World nations
Because if you are starting from scratch it's a lot easier to set up a telephone system with cellular phones than it is to install lots of cable. It's also a lot quicker and cheaper to get a cellphone system back operational following a major natural disater or war.
Telcos in Canada must be up for "five 9's" a year. Thats a law not just a slogan. ISPs do not. Its perfectly legal for an ISP to be up only twice a week for 45mins at a time.
So the reason you pay 0.05$ a minute for a long distance call with your telco and next to nothing with an ISP [e.g. using some VoIP program] is because Telcos are reliable. I mean if I go and call a buddy in British Columbia I am fairly certain of a few things
a) The call will go through
b) The quality of the signal is consistent
c) There is no lag or strong echoes
If I call with an ISP I may not be able to reach him [e.g. local fiber problems.. stupid rogers], or my mic/speaker setup may sound too bad, or worse there may be annoying ping times.
If all you want is an informal chat with a buddy then VoIP programs are ok. But if you need to conduct reliable communcation then telco's are about all you have to choose from.
As towards third world countries perhaps the calls are so expensive because maintaining a relibable connection is costly.
Tom
Someday, I'll have a real sig.
I have come to the conclusion that the telecom companies in the US are fighting a losing battle -- trying desperately to milk the last dollars out of a market and hoping that people don't have enough information to know that they're getting cheated royally.
Seriously, I get offers for long-distance in the mail for 7 cents a minute, or maybe 15 cents per minute "anytime", and they're trying to make it sound like they're doing me a favor. Then, when I decide that I'll go with a company like bigzoo for my long-distance needs, then they tack on some very dubious "taxes" and "surcharges" onto my bill to recoup their losses. I mean, I have to pay, not to have a long distance carrier! Is this fraud or what?
The telecom companies know that they're fighting a losing battle. It would be nice if they got on board and tried to lead the technology revolution, instead of getting dragged behind it. But that's asking a little too much of them, I guess. In the meantime, let them get screwed for promulgating such a stupid business model -- preying on people's ignorance.
Well, all the better for students and the less priviliged people around the world. Hopefully, at least in this aspect, the internet will set them free.
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 wonder if in a few years, when internet telephony takes off here in the States, we'll see the telco's trying to push new legislation to ban or regulate it to make up for their lack of flexible business model.
You know, like the RIAA is doing? Gee, don't try to embrace new technology and make money off of it, just buy some legislation to make sure you may remain entrenched in your old ways...
--- witty signature
I use pgpfone, and I'm pretty happy with it. It's windows-only, but this drawback pales in front of the advantage of having a snooper-proof connection; I don't discuss state-secrets over it - I don't evan know *any* state-secret - but I grin each time I hear about "internet wiretapping" and "more powers to the cops"...
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i've set it up for my mom, grandma, sister, and uncle.........and myself.....lots of free calls being a poor, geeky college kid doens't leave much money for family communication, the dorm is too small, i want to go home..........i also want to take the 10mb connection with me!
--fetch daddy's blue fright wig, i must be handsome when i release my rage
i gotta say, that's a lot of freaking time on the phone there. talking for 500 minutes per month, ld on the phone? for personal home use? wow. that's over 8 hours.
i gave up oon long distance after getting slammed by the phone companies (sprint, at&t). i currently have no long distance on the phone, and use a 20$ 500 minute calling card from sam's club to make a long distance phone call. portable minutes too (yeah, yeah, the pay phones jack on additional charges, but it's still portable.)
personally i kinda like using voip to some degree (quick chats to family/friends), but it's a matter of a square peg through a round hole. ip isn't the be all end all. everyone is jumping on some HUGE internet hype and trying to put every service over ip. microsoft might have said it best when they said that IP may not be the best protocol for distributed applications.
I've just come back from spending a month in Nepal, a very poor country with limited telecommunications facilities.
In the larger cities (Kathmandu, Pokhara) you could call the UK over the internet for about 25-50Rs/minute. Using a traditional phone line costs 125-200Rs/minute. When I was there 10 years previous it was US$5/min!
The exchange rate is something like 72Rs to US$1.
The costs are differences aren't as much as this posting said, but it's still quite a saving.
Personally I shopped around for a cheap real phone call (125-150Rs/min) as the quality was so much better.
I work on voice over IP telephony products, and I think that the market is ready to switch (pun intended).
SME's are figuring out that they can use their DSL lines to make net calls and video conferencing, and they're starting to ask (big time) exactly why they're paying per minute to make voice calls. And telcos are listening, and worrying.
There is a huge demand at the low end for true all-in-one products that encorporate an ethernet switch, DSL uplinks, a firewall and web server, handle IP-to-IP calls as well as IP-TDM, TWIF, ISDN (yuk), voicemail, door answer, that come with web browsing hardware phones and PC softphones and value added applications like videoconferencing. You would not believe the amount of software and hardware that we have in our current product; think 128Mb RAM, 128Mb compact flash, a 10 GB hard drive and a PCB that would make your head spin, in what's traditionally been a market for small (embedded devices.
And we're not developing this stuff simply because it's fun; there's a real demand from SME's for it. Initially we intended selling these boxes at retail (unheard of for a full featured telecomms switch); we've backed off from that now, simply because telco's are so keen to sell them as part of packages, because they know that if they don't, we will sell them at retail, and they'll lose a stack of voice money.
Note that the features that we enjoy today on residential lines - caller ID, call waiting, three party, callback - all came out of SME private branch exchanges. Telcos just realised that they could make extra money selling them to residential customers as well. They'll dig their heels in (hard) to stop us moving from TDM calls to VoiP, but - bearing in mind that once your call hits the local exchange, it hops to an IP backbone anyway - they can't hold out forever. Sooner or later, a residential provider will crack and start offering realistic VoiP to the home, and then all the rulebooks get ripped up. Roll on the day!
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
Speak Freely is a program that allows two or more people to conduct a real-time voice conference over the Internet or any other TCP/IP network. It supports a variety of compression protocols, such as GSM, ADPCM, LPC, and LPC-10. The cryptography-enabled version includes IDEA, DES, and limited PGP encryption capabilities for protecting the privacy of important voice conversations.
http://www.speakfreely.org/
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 $2 an hour inc taxes), bandwidth money from the ISP, and they still don't want to lose the international telephony deals, where they make ridiculous amounts of money.
All over Europe, telcos don't want to lose lucrative internation traffic. Real third world countries (rather than emerging economies) have neither enough bandwidth nor the latency required to provide adequate VoIP anyway.
However bandwidth in Morocco is pretty good. Check out www.tiboo.com for a site hosted in Morocco with high visits and reasonable serving of pages.
Conversion Rate Optimisation French / English consultant
Specifically Southwestern Bell.
I can go on and on, but I'll tell you this: I do not have a phone at home anymore, and I have long since abandonded my much loved 5 static ips and dsl as well, in favor of dynamic-only port-80 blocked sometimes-slower-than-M$-fixes-security-holes cable modem.
And I'm MUCH happier.
I will never in my life use SWBell's services. If I am running from rabbid wolverines and my only chance of survival is to purchase SWBell local phone service, I'd rather dive into a swimming pool filled with double-edged razor blades, followed by having my face eaten off by said wolverines.
I only make calls through dialpad, ($9.99 a month for 400 minutes). That's all my long distance AND all local calls. No incoming calls. My wife has gotten use to it. Sure beats $50/month for voice mail/caller id/call waiting/call waiting caller id/caller id call waiting calling/made up services to charge you extra in hopes you won't notice (slamming & cramming)/to just look at the caller id, and ignore the call.
Yeah, maybe it's a pain in the butt to connect the handset everytime I need to make a call (that's what wireless+laptop is for), and 911 isn't supported (that's what cell phones are for). But at 2.5 cents a minute, (and best of all NO SWBell), I see no comparison. People just page me, and I call them back. It's a plus, because none of our friends/family have to use long distance to get a hold of us either.
Oh yeah, and no spam calls/wrong numbers either...
I haven't tried this out yet, but it allows you to connect a regular (cordless) phone to your computer, eliminating the wire-fumbling.
OgreInsde
"The more you suffer, the more it shows you really care, right?" -Offspring
This means that something like a net phone is a revelation in terms of cost. I have a friend who has been talking to his brother in Germany with a net phone for a while now. The only problem is that this is illegal because ISPs are not allowed to carry voice traffic! In fact the telecoms monopoly tried to destroy ISPs by citing a law that states that nobody is allowed to resell bandwidth. Fortunately the lost the case, but it was touch and go for a while.
My greatest sadness is that new technologies promise so much for countries like ours, but our government makes horrible mistakes like legislating a monopoly. If we can just learn to embrace new technologies and learn from trends round the world, we can rapidly pull ourselves to the front out of the mire we are in at the moment.
In my admittedly limited experience with internet telephony, I have found that latency has been more of a problem than bandwidth. Presumably, your cyber cafes or universities are going to have enough bandwidth to support people using the internet for telephone use. After all, file sharing consumes more bandwidth than streaming voice does, and practically every geek on campus has been exploiting that technology. Compression of telephone-range frequency is good, because the frequency range required is not broad in the general sense of the term. I'm not pretending to be an expert here, but this is the impression I have gathered from my readings (so flame it up, if you have to)
However, IMHO, I have found it annoying to speak with people over the internet for the reason that the tempo of a conversation is often broken by having to wait for the person on the other side of the line to hear what you just said. I've taken this to be a latency-related issue, but hey I could be mistaken. At any rate, I'll stick with the telephone for now.
Here is what I want:
I want a service which will let me make phone calls to real phone numbers over my high speed broadband connection, using my existing telephone equipment (rj-11 cordless phone, etc.)
In addition, I would like to be able to recieve calls on it, using a number which would be free for people who live close to me to call.
Does such a service exist? I don't use my phone very often, and hate paying Verizon every month. I have a cable modem which usually gets very high thruput.
-Pete
Soccer Goal Plans
The above post is an editorial, the poster cannot and will not be held responsible for all or in part for it's contents
Depending on which country you're in YMMV, but I have found that using the canada direct service is fairly reliable and cheap. Basically you call 1-800-222-0016, and that gets you a line in canada, from there you can just use a calling card to place the call. So basically the call isn't going to cost more than a call within canada.
THe cool thing is seeing on the phone bill $50-60 in savings on a call that costs $2.50
The Cayman Islands has a phone monopoly protected by the government. I lived there for 3 years. In US dollars it was close to 1.50 per minute to call the US. We quickly learned to send our relatives money and have them call us at .30 - .50 per minute. The Cayman Islands likes to brag about being upscale by having the highest number of fax machines per capita. The reason for the large number of fax machines is due to the cost of a phone call. Nobody calls the states to get put into voice mail hell. They send a fax instead. Now that internet has reached the islands, I expect e-mail to replace fax unless spam gets too expensive to receive. Long distance charges are a good fax spam filter.
.30 per minute US. TOS prevented voice over internet. Needless to say very little browsing was done. Eudora was popular as the only client on many machines as a cheaper fax alternative. Connections were just long enough to send/receive mail. I never composed online. You can check out the current rates and terms of service at www.candw.ky The prices are not US dollars. 1.25 US will buy one CI dollar.(/RANT)
(begin RANT) Even 800 consumer service numbers are billed. I picked up my first copy of Windows 95 upgrade while there. (it was a few years ago) After installing it, it couldn't find the CD drive it was installed from, the modem, or the sound card. At 1.50 per minute for service, I simply chose to wipe the drive and recover the old OS from backups. I finaly upgraded after I returned to the US. An hour on the phone would have cost about what the upgrade cost. Dialup internet was about
The truth shall set you free!
I want my computer to be a single point of access to phones. I want it to automatically choose the cheapest method for me, whether it is a local call over standard phones, VoIP, or something else.
There has to be some hardware involved, for instance, I guess I need a card that is capable of making a call over the classical phone lines. Could a modem be used for this?
Then I could have a single front-end in my house, for example, I'øø have a Bluetooth access point, connected to the computer. Then I have a Bluetooth headset lying around. If I put it on, there is voise recognition, so that I can say "call ma", and if the cheapest call to ma happens to be a local telephone call, the computer will use the telephone card to make that call. If it happens to be VoIP, it makes a VoIP call, if I have to call on her cell phone, it dials that number.
This "while-we're-waiting-for-VoIP" card that I have in mind, anybody know if that's easy to make?
Employee of Inrupt, Project Release Manager and Community Manager for Solid
Damn... I have to pay 10 cents a minute to call (via telco) the next state which is only a few miles away. But I can cut the middle-man and call the drug smuggler directly in Honduras for the same price! Mmmmmmm.... technology...
Developers: We can use your help.
I recently read a short article that was written by a Jamaican back in 1995 or 1996. It discussed the availability of e-mail in Jamaica at the time. It turned out that e-mail was mostly being used to contact people outside of the region, and it wasn't being used to communicate locally.
I just wonder if this technology would do anything to foster local communities, rather than just connecting people over great distances. Certainly, talking to a relative who is away is important, but it's important to look at what can be done to improve the local infrastructure as well.
Yeah I remember back in the mid 80's being in a Ford plant's telco/server room and asking my guide about a piece of equipment I had never seen before, turns out it was a piece of telco switching equipment, telmex was so bad that Ford had it's own private telephone co for talking to their mexican plants!
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
Here in the U.S. internet telephony will probably take quite a while to catch on. Why? Because landline rates are cheap (at least compared to the rest of the world). Also, the quality of American landlines tends to be high, at least better than internet telephony.
So why is it so cheap? Because of the large installed base. The most expensive part of the infrastructure -- the copper "last mile" -- is already in place, and has been for nearly a hundred years. For the most part, that copper is already paid for. Plus, there is a lot of competition.
By sake of example, my long distance carrier, Opex, charges me $0.045/min for interstate and $0.09/min for intrastate calls. International rates are reasonable.
In third world countries, there isn't a very large installed base. The cost of installing new copper is high, and in many cases equipment is still being paid off. Plus, many countries have telco monopolies that charge whatever they feel like. So naturally, people will turn to promising alternatives such as internet telephony. When I was in Guatemala two years ago, it seemed there were more cell phones than landline phones. Cell towers were everywhere, it seemed. (On a side note, I walked thru a village where the houses were mud huts with no running water... but they had TV's and cell phones... priorities???)
Summarizing: U.S. landlines are higher quality than internet telephony and at reasonable cost; 3rd world landlines low quality high cost; might as well try VOIP.
Give me my freedom, and I'll take care of my own security, thank you.
You don't need rj-11. You need a good net connection (check out wireless), and a good voice connection.
Seriously, I pay the same amount as a voice line for a phone that has a number not where I live, but where the people who call me live, and free long distance anywhere in the US, free roaming (but no service outside of cities, but still everywhere I travel) I get caller id, unlisted number, and voicemail included, all of which are extra charge for a regular phone.
I don't care who provides my service (though if I have a choice I will choose someone who isn't lobbying goverment for laws I don't like) I care that I get good service. One number to call that always reaches me is nice. (I do not always answer the phone).
A more accurate definition of the origins of the term Third World:
THIRD WORLD -- the economically underdeveloped countries of Asia, Africa, Oceania, and Latin America, considered as an entity with common characteristics, such as poverty, high birthrates, and economic dependence on the advanced countries. The French demographer Alfred Sauvy coined the expression ("tiers monde" in French) in 1952 by analogy with the "third estate," the commoners of France before and during the French Revolution-as opposed to priests and nobles, comprising the first and second estates respectively. Like the third estate, wrote Sauvy, the third world is nothing, and it "wants to be something." The term therefore implies that the third world is exploited, much as the third estate was exploited, and that, like the third estate its destiny is a revolutionary one. It conveys as well a second idea, also discussed by Sauvy, that of non-alignment, for the third world belongs neither to the industrialized capitalist world nor to the industrialized Communist bloc. The expression third world was used at the 1955 conference of Afro-Asian countries held in Bandung, Indonesia. In 1956 a group of social scientists associated with Sauvy's National Institute of Demographic Studies, in Paris, published a book called Le Tiers-Monde. Three years later, the French economist Francois Perroux launched a new journal, on problems of underdevelopment, with the same title. By the end of the 1950's the term was frequently employed in the French media to refer to the underdeveloped countries of Asia, Africa, Oceania, and Latin America.
Four weeks ago I was in zambia, and met the looseing major presidential canadate in the most recent election. When I asked him what his plans were now, he said that since looseing the election he's been getting in wireless communications. He proceded to gush about the benefits of cell phones and how zambia was deepley in need of a rural cellular network. It was a bit etherial to be hearing this in the midst of a country where starvation is not uncommon.
Mod my comments down. It'll be fun.
I have always thought that "Third World" is a term coined during the Cold War, when a huge lot of countries which did not want to be aligned either with US-led or with USSR-led countries started a real movement, championed by India, if I am not wrong.
This was happening in the sixties, when all these countries were immersed in de-colonisation processes. Sadly, what they have in common today is mainly their poverty (but not all of them!).
In this context, the "First World" were the US allies, while the "Second World" were the Communist countries.
Finding Jesus is the only way out of the cycle of poverty and he ain't reachable by cell phone.
Given that he's verifiably dead I'd hazard there's a good reason you can't reach him by cell.
Max
My god carries a hammer. Your god died nailed to a tree. Any questions?
Funny, the way that the 3rd world is leading the charge in this particular area of new technology: VoIP.
It reminds of what was going on back in the early 1990s, when cell phone markets in India and other countries were booming, largely because cell phones provided so much more reliable service than the creating infrastructure of their land line telephone system.
I've heard that the cell phone business in many African countries is still lucrative, screwy government policies notwithstanding.
"Provided by the management for your protection."
While long distance carriers are already in trouble telcos that own the physical plant (the actual phone lines) are still in good shape. While their margins may shrink we still need them to maintain the plant.
Smart telcos will stop differentiating between phone and data service and provide one pipe with a protocol that supports both high latency/high bandwidth applications like internet access and low latency/low bandwidth applications like telephony. DSL is already kinda like that, except that it is viewed as an add-on rather than an integral part of the service.
The key part is integrated billing, where the bandwidth is not differentiated between data and phone services.
I am from Honduras, there is a law here that says that Hondutel (the only goverment telecom company) is the only one that can regulate international calls. Internet cafes can sell internet access, but they cannot sell phone calls, most of them are charging for phone calls not internet access, they could me banned and closed.
This is a monopoly created by the government.
There have been cases in which some people install a satellite link between honduras and the USA, install local telephone lines in Honduras, and sell phone cards in the states.
The long distance called would only costs the local call price (2 cents a minute plus the satellite link) and you could charge 40cents a minute for a long distance call from USA to Honduras. So you only need 20 local telephones lines and a satellite link to make a lot of money (if you dont get caught)
You can make up to 1 million dollars in 6 months..
Sorry for my english...
rb.