Slashdot Mirror
Customer-owned Networks: ZapMail & Telecoms
sasha writes "Here's a good article that describes how we, the consumers, can play the role of competitors to the vendors of products and services we buy. The author draws a parallel between FedEx's ZapMail failure and current situation with VoIP and WiFi in regard to the phone companies."
They are a government regulated monopoly as long as they own 80% of homes and businesses in any given area. That was why Covad and other CLEC's failed. They still had to pay the bells.
But it failed to point out that the big players in the telecom game are already well aware that their product (voice services via copper) are already obsolete. Why do you think the big boys (MCI, Sprint, Qwest) have such massive investments in the internet backbone? They recognize that the future of communications isn't land-line telephones, it's massive internet backbones. This is where every major player in the telecom game has banked their future. They're not idiots sitting in a smoke-filled conference room with no vision -- these people understand that their revenue stream on the internet side will ultimately replace their revenue stream on the consumer / voice side and they are already geared for it.
The point is that switching to the internet backbone for your voice services doesn't hurt them -- it simply moves your service from column A to column B on their balance sheet.
-- People who hate Windows use Linux. People who love UNIX use BSD.
Don't the phone companies already have pretty good control over internet access? Dial-up through the phone lines, DSL kind of goes through there too, and the cable companies are either phone companies or closely related to them. Once the phone companies lose the revenue stream from over charging us for phone access, they'll just charge us more for internet access. Well, I guess they'll do that either way.
I like his argument, mostly, but there is one flaw: He assumes the users have internet and will use it for Voice. But where do they get the internet access? The above would be fine, except I can't stand the terms of use for cable in my area (only one cable ISP.), and I have to have Voice (at least local) to get DSL. If I could get just DSL that would be fine, but there is no one who is offering it. So where do I get Internet in his scenario?
'Sensible' is a curse word.
I don't disagree with the author's conclusions about ZapMail and the Fax machine. However, there's a key difference between telephone calls through your phone company and voice-over-ip: Internet providers are out to screw their customers as much as the phone companies. Take Optimum Online's self-imposed limit on uploads. They cite P2P traffic, but in reality, wouldn't this put the kabash on Voice-over-IP? Lo and behold, Cablevision is working on it's OWN voice-over-IP solution. Guess if you don't want to cable modem capped, you'll have to pay for TWO services. The difference between the two business plans is that the customers bought fax machines and made an "end-run" around Fed-Ex completely. Try to circumvent the telephone company by pumping VoIP packets through your IP and you may be in for a rude awakening.
The big shift es going to come as people start to learn that overlaping WiFi nets can work together. As more and more of the networks grow and conect people are not going to nead the last mile any more. With the advent of new WiFi tech people will have the option to get away from neading to use the telecos lines.
If you're going to call someone over the internet, you need a static ip.. Or a dyndns domain name to route. Your average household connection, right now, if dynamic ip. It makes finding people difficult.
A second problem is the lack of deployment of high speed intenet... or maybe I should say, internet access that can be on 24/7 and not block the phone.
Oddly enough, these problems are the ones that p2p and instant messaging systems tend to get around. INstant messaging will alert you when someone is there and p2p has so many users it doesn't matter who is on, someone always is. Look how well they did.
I do find it funny that companies think users won't share internet accounts for multiple computers and will get two accounts. WiFi or not, I know no one with two i-net accounts for this purpose.
While an interesting article, it would seem to imply that being able to use a FAX machine at, say, Kinko's should not be possible because people would just have bought their own FAX machines. For a business that sends many FAX machines, buying and maintaining their own FAX machine as opposed to using some one else's may make sense. For personal use, it may not be worth the investment. The article does not seem to take that sort of market segmentation into account.
For example, if one assumes that if you use a phone service heavily and that you can provide it for yourself at a cheaper cost for bulk usage, you would. Businesses already do that for themselves with PBX systems (IP-based or not) -- in a sense, what the article is predicting has already happened, but only as far as the heavy users (i.e. businesses) are concerned.
If one assumes the FAX analogy as gospel, then... nothing will really change. Kinko's and other places will provide FAX services to the consumers that cannot afford or are not interested in buying and operating a FAX machine for casual use. Saying that the next generation of VoIP (bah) products will cause people to stop buying services from the phone companies seems likely to follow the same pattern. For the services which are labelled 'too expensive'... how many people actually use those services? Frequently? Enough to justify the expenditure in setting up and running the services on their own? Maybe the services just aren't worth it, whether provided by the phone companies or by one's self -- perhaps that will be the common sense of the consumer, that maybe some of these 'services' offered by the phone companies, or the new next generation ones hyped by VoIP just aren't worth the money.
The problem that faced Zapmail doesn't translate here. Zapmail failed because Fed Ex didn't own the underlying technology behind it, the telephone wires. Fed Ex had to buy the technology, the line and the fax machine, just like its customers. That's why the pricing never made sense, since nobody would pay the Fed Ex premium when they could go directly to the source.
That analogy doesn't work here, because the telcos own the underlying technology. Once they bundle phone and internet together, you have both no matter what. Sure, you can cancel the phone, but why, you've already paid for it.
Take my case for example, I can only get SBC DSL here. I don't like SBC's phone service, so I want to quit. Well, that's too bad for me, because I can't. In order for my DSL to work, I have to have SBC phone service. Since, I can't get a cable modem, I'm stuck with the service.
I keep seeing people saying this as being a stumbling block to voip. I don't really understand though, is not having 911 that big of a deal? The town I grew up in didn't have it till the mid 90s and we managed to survive OK. Also, unless I am mistaken, 911 is typically linked to a regular local number. So you can just program that number into a speed dial function of your phone. While the 911 operator won't be able to pull up an address, the same is true of cell phones and I know plenty of people that have replaced their land lines with cells.
You're comapring apples and oranges. Don't think that today's Type 3 plain-paper "just plug it in and it works" fax was like the fax machines of 1984. Those fax machines costs thousands of dollars, had poor quality, were difficult to set up, and required lots of maintenance for their toner replacements and special fax-only paper.
The reason we have easy to use cheap fax machines today is that there was a market for difficult expensive ones 15 years ago. The same thing happened with radios, calculators, and, of course, computers.
Today's VoIP and WiFi installations are cheaper and easier than they used to be, and will be both cheaper and easier again by the end of this year. Comparing a mature technology with one still in early adoption phase, and concluding that the latter has no chance, is to mistake the acorn for the oak.
-clay
I don't think we are ever really rid of monopolies but I do agree that the government plays are large role in the regulation of monopolies. You should read the full history of AT&T. It's such a mixed bag. Here we have a government-regulated monopoly for most of the 20th century that essentially laid the last mile (i.e. the copper line), invented the transistor, invented UNIX, gave UNIX away (yay!), got busted into different companies, tried to take UNIX back (boo!), and is struggling to compete today. (If there's a RUN-ON sentence option for modding down...go for it.
--K.
Sig: Bad people happen. Try to avoid being one of them.
That's funny, my digital cell phone plan is more expensive than my old analog phone was 5 years ago. In fact, it's $10 a month more and all I have to show for it is 250 "free" minutes compared to 100 "free" minutes under the analog plan. I don't notice any difference in sound quality. With digital it either works or it disconnects. With analog it got staticy but usually didn't drop. What an advance. My digital cell phone is the same size as my old analog Nokia cell phone yet cost much more than it. What are YOUR advantages?
Normal c-o-m-p-e-t-i-t-i-o-n drives innovation, as each company has to come up with the new thing to get people to buy it.
5 years ago Japanese schoolgirls had cheap cellphones with more power than your cheap cell phone. It can hardly be called "progress" when we continue playing "keep up with the Joneses" so to speak.
Recently the gap has been closing. But take a look at other countries' recent offerings (for links, just look through The Register archives).
Part of the problem is the FCC restricting the features of broadcast. Part of the problem is phone companies not wanting to invest in changing. Part of the problem is that people either don't know or don't care about what they could be getting for their money.
I'm the first to admit that I'm in that last group. I don't really like cellphones and when I am eventually forced to get one, I'll try to get the least whiz-bang model I can find because I don't care about all that extra jazz.
If I have been able to see further than others, it is because I bought a pair of binoculars.
Well, no, they're not. I remember when I was a child, we'd sit there and wait until the phone ticked one minute past 5:00, then we'd call the family in Oklahoma. The amount you saved by calling "after the rates went down" was significant enough that in most residences, you didn't make long-distance calls during business hours unless it was an emergency.
I thought it was just my mom having grown up poor and all that, but then a couple years ago I had occasion to see the comparative per-minute rates from The Phone Company(tm) vs. Now. Then it all made sense. (Wish I could remember where I saw it so I could cite it.)
Since the company has been split up, and has switched over to digital signaling, our costs have gone down significantly. When you factor in cost-of-living changes, I believe that even the value-added services (like call waiting, voicemail, etc.) are significantly cheaper than they were a decade ago.
Or so the RIAA would have you believe, but no one's yet demonstrated that P2P networking ever replaced any purchasing activity.
I think the author missed a really good bet when he made this comparison. After all, cell phones are the really, really obvious example of how people don't care quite so much about voice quality in a telephone call. We're willing to say "What? What was that? Can you hear me now?" many times in a conversation if it means we can take our phones with us everywhere and play games on them when we're bored. Losing a little quality to have cheaper, more flexible "landline" service is a no-brainer.
Don't you wish your girlfriend was a geek like me?
who's to say that voip necessarily means that it's limited to standard telco quality? why not pump up the bandwidth and slap the CPU around by compressing mp3 on the fly? imagine:
- phone conversations that make it sound like the other person was RIGHT THERE!
- you can hold the phone up to the radio and uh. something like. uh. easy shoutcasting!
- superior phone sex!
- etc.
no, really. i'm serious. regular telephone sound quality sucks rocks. market it smart, and make people believe they NEED better sound quality from their phone conversations! sucker them in!
ah, yes. another technology driven by pr0n.
5 years ago Japanese schoolgirls had cheap cellphones with more power than your cheap cell phone. It can hardly be called "progress" when we continue playing "keep up with the Joneses" so to speak.
It's easier to implement infrastructure changes when the area you have to deal with is slightly smaller than California. It's all those empty (sans people) miles of desert, mountain and farm land that hold back a lot of things because it's downright expensive to cover the whole of the U.S.
You'll notice that you don't get digital cellular reception everywhere in the country - a whole bunch of places will drop back to analog - or just drop - once you get away from the Interstate highways. Take a look at the coverage maps for Verizon, AT&T and Sprint.