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Wireless Industry Cozying Up To the Disruptors
PreacherTom writes, "As recently as a few months ago, the wireless industry showed little apparent interest in partnering with companies like Sling, Skype, and ISkoot. After all, they make products that threaten to compete with services that mobile-phone companies are eager to sell. Times are changing, at first in Europe and perhaps soon in the U.S. A few days ago, Sling Media's CEO sat down with execs from Hutchison Whampoa, Nokia, and Sony Ericsson for discussions. Skype isn't far behind, while ISkoot is in 'advanced discussions.' According to analyst Krishna Kanagarayer, 'This could turn the U.S. wireless industry on its head. The advent of mobile access to full-blown home PC and TV applications could lead to a revamp in pricing of wireless service providers' data plans, possibly to tiered pricing. And as applications such as mobile Skype take hold, data and voice use will become indistinguishable.'"
The mesh-network internet is coming, sooner or later (my money being on later, especially in this country, but my point still stands) and any wireless provider who doesn't have a piece of it will be irrelevant. When WiFi connectivity is as ubiquitous as the cellular network, or frankly even before that, people will go to WiFi+VoIP in droves because it won't require that you, like, spend any money. What could be better than that?
This is of course why providers are willing to sell cellphones with WiFi. At least that way they get some money out of the hardware.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Most people don't really understand what the whole internet idea is, in its most basic form. They only realize what it can do for them by the services it offers (web, email, bitorrent etc). When one realizes what the Internet truly offers, communication, then it becomes clear what what the possibilities truly are.
Anything that can be imagined as getting two things talking to each other is the basics of the Internet, everything else is specifics. Wireless, Optical, copper are all mediums for that communication, nothing more, nothing less.
As mediums become more ubiquitous, and as they start to overlap, it just provides greater continuity of the communication which enables forms of communication that were previously impossible without the overlap and continuity.
Something I once discovered for my self (though in a completely unrelated sector), is that if it takes too long to do something, you just don't do it. If it takes 7 days to download a movie (dialup) while it is possible to do it, most people didn't. Now that it takes a couple of hours or less, people are starting to consider it. A couple of years ago, it took 6 hours to encode a CD to MP3, now it takes just a few minutes.
Because of the increase in bandwith, the ubiquitous connection, we are starting to see new means of communication which were impossible only a few years ago. It is inevitable. And things that take days or long hours today, will shortly be available for the average person. Those are the things we should be looking at.
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
I don't want them to cozy up.. I want them to fight tooth and nail to keep their over-priced our-services-or-no-services mentality until they are driven out of business.
I didn't know that Skype could phone Kronos. Those Klingon disrupters shouldn't be put up to your ear though.
Oh You POS
And as applications such as mobile Skype take hold, data and voice use will become indistinguishable.
Not if the Baby Bells and the likes of SBC/AT&T have anything to say about it.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
The industry needs to get out of the old 20th century phone system mentality and become part of the Internet. I bought a Treo 650 from Sprint a while back. Recently I switched to Cingular but had to buy another phone because the one from Sprint doesn't work on Cingular's network.
Could you imagine if the Internet had been designed and implemented by private industry? It would be a whole bunch of separate networks and you'd be nickel and dimed for every service.
Phone systems are just plain dumb.
And as applications such as mobile Skype take hold, data and voice use will become indistinguishable.
As it should be. I think most of us here have only been waiting for this to happen for about 10 years. The fact that it's gone on for so long like it has is actually kind of surprising. (or not, depending on how cynical you are about corprate profiteering)
The theory of relativity doesn't work right in Arkansas.
I have Verizon's EV-DO broadband for my laptop. For $60/mo I have 'unlimited' access that in most places is about comparable to average home DSL service. It sounds expensive, but if you consider that I travel -- take off hotel access fees, airport access fees, starbucks/borders/other hotspot fees -- or the hassle of war driving -- and it starts looking very good.
I use it several days a week. It still has downsides - like all cheap service it suffers from "Gravity Well" syndrome. Inbound data is free, fast, and cheap. Output data is difficult, slow, and expensive.
My point is, I'm already using the cell networks for more data than voice. A lot more. I could (if I wanted) make voip calls over the cell networks but why? It's just as cheap to do it by cell phone "out of band".
What I really really wish for -- what would be WAY better -- is if telcos and wireless telcos would make use of DUNDi lookups. That would allow those of us with VOIP phones to receive calls which never transit the public networks. The cell carrier would check the DUNDi service and see that when dialing my number they could bypass the public network and just connect with a voip call directly.
Most don't do this now. Even though it would save them money on cross-connection (after all, they have to connect to the PSTN as well) they're more afraid of being bypassed themselves then of spending the extra money.
As a result, I have to pay a monthly fee essentially for the address routing which is my PSTN telephone number.
The problem with quotes on the internet, is that nobody bothers to check their veracity. -- Abraham Lincoln
This is true however the largest connectivity cost is the "last mile" of cable. Once the internet moves from it's present state towards localised mesh-networks, that are interconnected by fiber/whatever, then most of the cost of that last mile disappears.