Slashdot Mirror
The Voice Over IP Insurrection
Chris Holland writes "Daniel Berninger wrote the most informative article about Voice over IP I've ever read, over at Om Malik's blog. It outlines in great details the history behind the evolution of traditional communication technologies framed within the convergence of various Internet-related technological advances, and the challenges PSTN telcos are facing to hold-on to their shares of this lucrative pie. Beyond mere technological issues, Berninger offers great parallels and insights on past, current, and future governmental regulatory policies. A must read for anyone who's ever talked on the phone."
Informative article?
On a BLOG?
Full of factual errors and void of any actual useful content?
Nothing to see here, please move along.
--
Save the internet, append -inurl:blog to all google searches!
You're absolutely right, it's about in the same state it was in 1995. But only because the cost of broadband didn't make it feasible.
But now that broadband is cheap, it's starting to make a lot of sense, especially with companies that have large WANS full of bandwidth. The company I work for has 100 megabits of fiber connected between 8 locations through a company called Telco. They're paying $10,000 per month for the fiber and since the satellite offices need to call corporate a lot, VOIP on our own bandwidth saves thousands on phone bills per month.
Cheap broadband for the residential user makes VOIP a possibility too. I ditched my landline last month and ported the number to my wife's cell phone. The phone in the house is Voicepulse and it's been as reliable or better than the Verizon POTS. You can't tell the difference in call quality.
Six years ago, my local telephone bill was $22 per month with caller-id. My last POTS bill was close to $60. Really, all telcom reform has done for me is drive up my bill to outrageous amounts.
The incumbent telephone companies all have their own VOIP service. Problem is, they think that VOIP is reason enough to switch and they offer paltry savings on VOIP as compared to POTS; if there's any savings at ALL. Verizon's VOIP service was $40 per month and I was paying close to $60 with just caller-id. Somehow they think that phone service should guarantee them a fixed amount of revenue. VOIP offers the very real chance at local telephone competition without requiring new players to build their own networks or rent from the incumbents.
In fact, this has been the whole impediment to local phone competition. The incumbents have for years resisted renting out their networks to competitors. They've tried legislation and regulations to make it cost prohibitive and have pretty much succeeded while giving themselves a paltry profit line in interstate and intrastate access fees.
The gig is up; everyone stands to save money if they don't use the traditional telephone network.
Within five years, the telco world will have changed.
... It's a disruptive technology.
We will observe a strong fragmentation of the telecommunications world as many small companies will try to get their share of this multi-bilion dollars market. And just because of the low entry cost (look at asterisk, Convedia, Ubiquity, Appium, and many other players way too numerous to list here), you don't have to be a huge company to deliver services in that emerging market of VoIP services (here, by VoIP services, I don't only mean providers, but also secondary services like voice recognition, IVRs, vertical markets services, unified messaging, value-added access resellers, etc.). Maybe after, the market will reconsolidate though.
VoIP is to telco what PC was to computing, what the Amiga Video Toaster was to TV productions, what Napster was to RIAA, what iPod was to MP3 music, what Internet was to information access, what Word, Excel and Powerpoint was to corporations,
It's a fact; those who can't adapt to their changing environment will disappear. And new dominant players will take their place in a new order...
I wonder what my phone (ok, communication device) will look like and will allow me to do in 5 to 10 years from now.