Earlier this week I had a fun moment joining a cast of characters to help the Telecom Junkies podcast celebrate crossing over 100 episodes. In the 101st episode, now available for listening, host Jessica Gdowski invited 7 of her previous guests back to give brief updates. So I joined Martha Buyer, Mark Fletcher, Hank Levine, John Lyon, Dave Spofford, and Allan Sulkin for the ~20 minute show.
In my case, I've been a guest on the show three times previously, most notably in August 2007 with "Interview with a VoIP Hacker" where we interviewed Robert Moore shortly before he was heading to prison.
In this 101st episode recorded this week I gave a brief update on the Pena/Moore case (Pena recently pled guilty) and then talked about VoIP and Unified Communication security issues. It was literally just a few minutes, but I was glad to join briefly and help Telecom Junkies celebrate. 100 podcast episodes is indeed a milestone to celebrate! Congrats!
I still find the whole process bizarre. I do understand the fundamental motivation... here in the USA, there are only three wires going into (almost) every home:
electrical power line
phone line
cable television line
If you want to get your service into a home in the USA over a wire, you have to ride over one of those three wires. That's it.
So I can see the logic someone out there is thinking... he/she who controls a wire has a platform to launch services.
There are, though, two major problems I see:
1. WIRELESS, a.k.a. WE DON'T NEED NO STINKING WIRES - While there may be only three wires going into the home, there are a lot of wireless signals going into the home. While it may not have the performance of wired connections, I know a good number of folks who now have wireless Internet. And while much of this has traditionally been satellite-based, I'm seeing some folks going for the wireless WAN cards (or "air cards") offered by the cellular networks - and some of the newer laptops with this technology built right in. Plus you have to wonder about newer technologies like WiMAX should they ever start to really take off.
2. LANDLINES ARE LOSING - As I mentioned in my last post, US residents are leaving landlines behind. The NHIS survey I referenced showed the number of homes without landlines at over 20% - and increasing rapidly. My own perception based on comments from people around me is that the cable companies are eating the telcos' lunches when it comes to signing up new people. I need to pull some stats to back up that view - but anecdotally I'm finding more people signing up for cable Internet (often as part of a "triple play") and I haven't heard of anyone in recent times signing up for DSL from their phone company.
To me, I just can't see the landline business as a great place to be these days... but obviously some folks out there think they can somehow magically make it work. I wish them luck.
What do you think? Would you invest in the landline business in 2009?
Yesterday Google made another fascinating move in the telephony space... letting people use Google Voice with their existing phone number. This is key because previously if you wanted to try out Google Voice you had to get a new phone number that was different from any of your existing numbers.
Now a business or individual can move their existing number over to Google Voice... and Google can try to convert users over to their service from other services.
[UPDATE: Note that Google states that you can use Google Voice "with your existing mobile phone number", i.e. not a landline phone number. Others have pointed out that essentially all you are doing is forwarding your unanswered calls to Google's voicemail service instead of your mobile carrier's voicemail service. In this way, Google Voice is basically just like Jott or any of the many other similar services out there. Except, of course, it is from Google.]
When you use an existing number, Google Voice gives you these services:
Online, searchable voicemail
Free automated voicemail transcription
Custom voicemail greetings for different callers
Email and SMS notifications
Low-priced international calling
With a new phone number under Google's control, you get additional services like conferencing, call recording, call screening, etc. More significantly, you get what I consider the key feature of Google Voice:
One number that reaches you on all your phones
That's the value I get out of Google Voice. If you call me on +1-802-735-1624, it rings me on my mobile, on my desk phone, on Skype (via SkypeIn), on a SIP phone... and could on other phones as well. That "one number" service is not available for existing phone numbers... but only for new numbers Google controls.
Without that feature, Google Voice is essentially a hosted voicemail provider for your existing phone number.
Except, of course, it is free.
Free and part of the ever-growing suite of Google services.... and still in beta and still invitation-only... but yet, it is Google. It will be interesting to watch over time what disruption this new offering causes in the traditional hosted voicemail market.
Meanwhile, it's now out there and if you want to try Google Voice with an existing number, you can request an invitation or find someone with an existing GV account and ask them for one of their 3 invites. (Sorry, mine are all gone.)
From the "Duh! What were they thinking?" desk, the big news up there in the northeastern part of the US is that our major local landline provider, Fairpoint Communications, has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection today. Last year, Fairpoint paid $2.4 billion for Verizon's landline business in Maine, New Hampshire and Vermont and formally took over the network earlier this year, with all sorts of ensuing service challenges which have been well-documented.
As FierceTelecom points out, this bankruptcy has been expected for quite some time now. Last week there was much publicity up in these parts about Fairpoint working with its unions and banks to try to avoid the formal filing... but obviously today's filing indicates that they couldn't pull the proverbial rabbit out of the hat. This morning, Fairpoint issued a news release and set up a web site about their restructuring:
Now, I should mention that I am a Fairpoint customer and do have a landline from them - I've also not personally had any customer service issues with their service. I am also not at all surprised.
I thought Fairpoint's acquisition of Verizon's landline business last year was an exceedingly dumb idea then - and I still think that today.
More than one of every five American homes (20.2%) had only wireless telephones (also known as cellular telephones, cell phones, or mobile phones) during the second half of 2008, an increase of 2.7 percentage points since the first half of 2008. This is the largest 6-month increase observed since NHIS began collecting data on wireless-only households in 2003. In addition, one of every seven American homes (14.5%) received all or almost all calls on wireless telephones, despite having a landline telephone in the home.
I personally expect that trend to continue and if anything to accelerate as we collectively continue to choose mobile devices - and also as the cable companies and other players out there continue to offer compelling alternatives to the traditional landline. (Hmmm... and gee, do you think the cable companies up here aren't going to seize this opportunity to court Fairpoint customers?) And while I kept our landline for several reasons, I don't necessarily expect that I'll need it for a long time.
Sure... perhaps Fairpoint thought it could make money off the Internet access side of the house... I mean, buying your way into being the incumbent utility ought to be a good thing, right? But then again, the cable companies are right in there... as are the satellite folks and many others offering Internet access...
For those out there interested in how telephony - and all communications - is being disrupted, the place to be this week is very definitely eComm Europe in Amsterdam. It's definitely a gathering of the "tribe" of people who are on out there defining the bleeding edge of the communications space. Great speakers, great schedule... it should be a great event!
Sadly, a schedule conflict prevented my attendance, but as I wrote about on the Voxeo Talks blog, Voxeowill have a presence there in the form of multiple speakers as well as a booth. More info can be found on the Voxeo event page at:
If you are at eComm Europe, please do say hello to RJ Auburn or Jay Phillips... or stop by our booth. Also, look for the fun giveaway in the eComm bag. ;-)
And if, like me, you can't get there... you can follow along in the eComm tweet stream and see info posted up on the eComm blog. It should be a great show, so I'm definitely looking forward to hearing and reading more about what goes on there.
Beyond simply the interop, what's perhaps more interesting is to note the direct Cisco involvement with this news release (through a quote). Looking at the overall industry, it's interesting to see Cisco and Skype connecting. I admit that I haven't studied Cisco's UC500 product much at all, although per the news release it sounds like they are doing some interesting things with it:
The Cisco Unified Communications 500 Series platform is part of Cisco’s Smart Business Communications System which continues to expand having just added a new set of IP phones with high definition audio, a unified threat management device as well as support for third party application integration, including products from healthcare, automotive and insurance industries.
Congrats to both Skype and Cisco on this announcement. I expect we'll be seeing more of these announcements in the weeks and months ahead as Skype continues to aggressively court partners. The Skype For SIP offering does provide some useful functionality for on-premise IP-PBX systems:
Ability to receive inbound calls from Skype users
Ability to receive inbound calls from PSTN users through "online numbers" (formerly SkypeIn)
Ability to place outbound calls to PSTN users
The Online Number functionality is particularly interesting as you can easily set up any series of numbers in other parts of the world that ring back into your IP-PBX. Sure, you can do that with any other SIP trunking provider, too, but Skype makes it incredibly easy to provision those numbers - and for a very low annual cost, too. Making your IP-PBX accessible to all the Skype users, too, is quite powerful.
Now if only you could make outbound calls to Skype users... (NOT possible with Skype For SIP, but possible with Skype For Asterisk).
Anyway, congrats again to Skype and Cisco on this announcement.
I doubt the chart is a huge surprise for anyone following the industry, but it still does make for an interesting graphic. Despite all the advertising money that Vonage can throw out there, Comcast and the other cable providers have the inherent advantage that they can easily offer powerful "triple-play bundles" of cable TV, Internet access and phone service.
Comcast is no longer my provider (Time-Warner services Keene, NH, where I live.), but when I lived in Burlington, VT, we had Comcast for Internet access and Verizon for phone (and we didn't have anyone for TV, since we don't watch it). The offers that Comcast kept sending us, though, encouraging us to switch, were quite compelling. The amount I paid for Internet access would have been lower if I had either phone or TV with Comcast, and even lower if I had all three.
If we actually watched TV and therefore wanted cable TV, the economics of the "triple-play" would be very hard to beat... so it's no surprise at all to me to see this chart. I would expect we'll continue to see the growth of one and the continued stagnation of the other.
What would be more interesting to me would be to see the subscriber growth of Comcast versus the other MVNOs and the DSL providers. Fascinating times we live in...
Sir Terry Matthews speaks to BNN about the state of the industry in Canada, why he loves home-grown startups and what he sees as the next big thing in technology.
If you've not heard him before, the interview is a good view into the passion, enthusiasm and charisma that keeps him starting up companies all over the place. The report says he's now up to 80 companies or so that he's started up... and I'm not surprised.
His overall message, though, is what he has been consistent saying for many years now... we are in an age where incredible broadband capacity is coming online - as that happens, what will we do to make use of all that bandwidth?
This week out at the Emerging Communications Conference in San Francisco, I gave a 10-minute talk called "The Park Bench Manifesto: Why We Want To Kill Off The PSTN". In the talk, I mentioned that the text would be available here soon... And it will be.
In the meantime though, I have put up both the video and the 54-slide deck over on <a href="http://blogs.Voxeo.com/ett/">blogs.voxeo.com/ett/</a>
With a simple "I've changed jobs" blog post (way shorter than any blog post I've ever written), Martin Geddes let us all know that he was now joining BT. The post over on Telco 2.0 goes into more about Martin's move and his reasons why he sees BT's future as bright...
Besides having one of the coolest blog names ("Telepocalypse"), Martin's a great writer and thinking in our space. We've only met a couple of times, but I've always respected the work he's done and enjoyed his writing. I wish him all the best at BT and look forward to what may evolve there!
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