Communications

Interactive zipcode-by-zipcode info on US Broadband Access

The Communications Workers of America, i.e. the union that represents many of the workers at the ILECs, Verizon, AT&T and Qwest, has a great website called Speed Matters.  I don't think we see eye to eye on the solution, but we agree there is a problem:  The US is falling farther and farther behind in broadband access when compared with the rest of the world.

Among other things, Speed Matters offers a speed test, asking first for your zipcode and email address.  They have been accumulating data for a while now, at least since I last mentioned them in February.

Now Speed Matters has added an interactive zipcode by zipcode account of Internet access capabilities across the US.  It's also available as a report in pdf form.

But averaging by zipcode doesn't tell the real story!

I do a lot better at my home:  20 Mbps down and 2.7 Mbps up vs. averages for my zipcode of 1596/ 562 kbps up.

I do a lot worse at my summer camp in Maine where averages for the zipcode are 729/ 135 kbps but I'm beyond the limits for DSL and 1100 feet from the nearest cable TV line and so remain limited to ~26 kbps using a dialup connection.

AT&T's Video Sharing, in an IMS-based walled garden

After writing about AT&T's video sharing service that includes Samsung handsets with NMS software inside, I got two private emails, both from people wanting to use this service to stream video to websites.  This is not surprising.  It's a great idea.  NMS demonstrated a service like this at the 3GSM conference in Barcelona last February and got a lot of interest.  The problem is, you either need the operator's cooperation or you need some serious kludgery.

Note:  the following analysis is a guess on my part.  I could speak with some of our developers and perhaps get more specific detail, but then I might risk violating some non-disclosure agreement.  So what follows describes the way IMS-based video sharing is supposed to work.  AT&T boasts their Video Sharing is "Powered by New-Generation IMS Network Technology."

IMS-based Video Sharing is a provisioned service which means, when you sign up, your Home Subscriber Service (HSS) entry is updated to reflect the fact you have the service and software on your handset is enabled.  If you haven't signed up for the service, you don't even see the relevant icons on you phone.  Then when you go to make a call, there is a database dip in the HSS to verify that you, and the party you are trying to call, both have video sharing service.  This guarantees the connection will work, or it produces a clear error message if the connection won't work.  But this also means, you can't connect to an arbitrary SIP address.

Too bad!, as our Video Access developers platform would otherwise allow you to terminate a call and route the video to a website or other video destination.  But for now, that's not to be.  The AT&T service description is quite clear, video sharing only works when both parties have video sharing enabled handsets and both are on AT&T's 3G network.

More on teleuse at the bottom of the pyramid

My earlier post on the LIRNEasia's study of telecoms use by the very poorest people in Pakistan, India, Sri Lanka, Philippines and Thailand, generated a few public comments and some direct emails.  In addition, I've now read through the rest of the public material about this project.  Several points emerge.

SMS usage is almost totally a function of the relative cost of a voice call as Dimuthu Ratnadiwakara from the LIRNEasia team comments here.

Access to telephony is better than I thought.  I remember saying (back in 1999) that half the people in the world had never made a phone call.  Eight years later and things are considerable better.  First we are rapidly approaching the point where 50% of the people will own their own mobile phone (sometime in 2008), but more importantly, most people, even at the lowest income levels, already have access to a phone when they need one.

Keeping in touch with family and friends is the number one reason to use a phone, by a large margin!  I thought business would be up there, but no, the number one universal human need is to keep in touch with family and friends and that need exceeds all others.

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Surprising communications patterns found by Swisscon anthropologist

Both Bob Schechter and Joe Pavlat forwarded me copies of the article, Home truths about telecoms (subscription), that appeared in the current Economist Technology Quarterly.  The most interesting were these points from an interview with Stefana Broadbent,

an anthropologist who leads the User Adoption Lab at Swisscom, based on studies of users in Switzerland and France:

• "Although mobile phones make it easier to keep in regular touch <...> a typical user spends 80% of his or her time communicating with just four other people."
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• Different channels serve different purposes.  Mobile calls are for last-minute co-ordination.  Texting is for “intimacy, emotions and efficiency.”  E-mail is to exchange pictures, documents and music.  IM and voice-over-internet calls are “continuous channels”, open in the background while people do other things.
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• Writing is on the increase.  “Users are showing a growing preference for semi-synchronous writing over synchronous voice,” says Ms Broadbent.
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• Private communications are invading the workplace. Workers expect to be plugged into their social networks while at work, whether by e-mail, IM or mobile phone.
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• Traveling workers use airports and hotels for email, delaying substantive work until they are back at their desks.
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• It is migrants, rather than geeks, who have emerged as the “most aggressive” adopters of new communications tools.

Not the way I thought about anthropologists, so I doubled checked the definition of anthropology, finding this at Wikipedia:

... cultural and social anthropology has been distinguished from other social science disciplines by its emphasis on in-depth examination of context, cross-cultural comparisons ..., and the importance it places on long-term, experiential immersion in the area of research, often known as participant-observation.

  Indeed, Stefana and her lab appear to be immersed in their studies.

Optimism in Africa

More breakfast reading..., of commentary generated during and after the recent TED Global 2007 conference in Arusha, Tanzania.  Technorati has pointers of course, but the most prolific blogger is Ethan Zuckerman with almost verbatim transcripts of each session.  And, the talk I found most interesting was that by former Nigerian finance minister Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala. 

Some excerpts from Ethan Zuckerman:

... we’re seeing changes in Africa that we never thought would happen. We’ve seen annual growth of 5%, in some cases 6-7%, up from 2%. External debt has been massively reduced. Countries are building up foreign exchange reserves, shoring up their currencies. Private investment flows are increasing, remittances to Nigeria are skyrocketing, and there’s a net inflow of capital.

But Africa needs jobs. 62% of Africa’s population is under 24. We have to figure out how to make these people productive. Nigeria is now building an opinion research organization, a way of listening to citizen voices, which she notes is a rare thing on the continent. The top issue in every survey? Jobs.

Then after a heart felt story of saving her sister's life with help from a clinic sponsored by foreign aid,

Okonjo-Iweala tells us she doesn’t believe aid, even aid to save lives, in the sole answer. We have to use it well. Why has southern Spain developed? On the back of aid which was provided to build road and infrastructure. Ireland is one of the fastest growing economies in the world - they used aid to build infrastructure to build an information society. “They didn’t say no to aid - but if they can build infrastructure in Spain, why do they refuse to build the same infrastructure in our countries?”

Finally,

The Chinese are so popular in Africa, she tells us, because they don’t shy away from infrastructure.

Thank you Ethan Zuckerman.  I wish I could have been there. 
And, I'll definitely follow the future career of Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala.

Doing business with, or giving aid to, the developing world

This morning over breakfast I was reading commentary on TED Global 2007 and development in Africa, while my wife was reading a Guardian Weekly article about Nicholas Negroponte's reaction to Intel's Classmate computer.  An interesting overlap emerged.

First, the TED Global 2007 commentary exposed the extent to which the west, i.e. the US and EU, treat Africa as a disaster area to be "aided."  That's a very different from say, the Chinese, who are going to Africa to do business.  Although not part of the TED blogs, Howard French says it best as he summarizes a flight between Africa and Beijing, full of Chinese businessmen, and then recalls similar flights between the US and Africa:

...the passengers one finds aboard the few existing flights linking the United States to Africa make for an interesting comparison with my Chinese fellow travelers. Yes, there is a smattering of business people and of tourists. But the Americans who travel to Africa tend to be aid workers of one kind or another: officials of the U.S. government and of the international financial institutions, like the World Bank, and the army of well-paid consultants and contractors that they deploy. They are also relief workers and missionaries and Peace Corps volunteers, and academics doing research.

There is much to be gleaned from the contrast here. Chinese people today look at Africa and see opportunity, promise and a fertile field upon which their energies, mercantile and otherwise, can be given full play. Too often, the West looks at Africa and sees a problematic pupil, a sickly patient, and a zone of pestilence, where failure looms in the air like a curse.

As I was reading this, my wife commented on the Guardian article (essentially the same content as this BBC article), surprised that Nicholas Negroponte was upset when Intel introduced its own low cost computer for the developing world, in competition with the One Laptop per Child initiative.  Surely competing computers can only be good for children in developing countries??  But apparently Intel is bucking the "father knows best," we have to give them aid, approach still prevalent in much of the west.

I don't have a lot of Africa experience, but NMS Communications does business in Africa, selling AccessGate RAN backhaul optimizers for rural cellsites and MyCaller ringback tone systems for personalization services in rapid growth markets as diverse as South Africa and Nigeria. 

There is plenty of business going on in Africa.  And ultimately, it's Africans doing business that will solve the problems that decades of aid have failed to solve.  Hopefully more western companies will join the Chinese in doing business with, and fostering business in, Africa (and other parts of the developing world).

Proof that cost differentials drive SMS usage

It's widely known that SMS usage in the Philippines exceeds that of any other country, but I haven't noticed a concise explanation of what's going on.  The fact that SMS started out as a free service is occasionally mentioned, but that was long ago — as SMS adoption soared, charges were rapidly introduced.

Now Babar Bhatti points to a study, Teleuse at the Bottom of the Pyramid, by LIRNEasia which includes some compelling data, e.g.

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Of course there are multiple contributing factors, but the perceived cost of voice calls is surely one of the most important. Yes, there are issues of literacy, local language interfaces and other effects, but when considering poor people at the bottom of the economic ladder, cost seems paramount.

Invitiations available for Dopplr private beta

Dopplr is a social network for travelers.  Plug in your travel schedule and a list of people you'd be happy to meet.  Get back info on who will overlap with you, when and where.

I joined last month, but the pool of people using the service was small (my internal ID is 993) and their overlap with people I know or want to meet was smaller (less than a dozen at that time).  So I listed my known travel schedule and thought no more of it.  Indeed, no meetings have come about as a result.  My one impromptu meeting (with Darren McKellin of Visto) on last week's Asia trip, resulted from my blog post not a connection via Dopplr.

But now I notice I have "unlimited" Dopplr invitations available.  So while it's still in private beta, it appears I can invite all of my readers!  If you are crazy enough to follow this RSS feed or otherwise read any of what I write, then I'm vain enough to correspond, and possibly, meet.

Either way, if you are interested in joining the Dopplr private beta, send me an email (rbt at nmss.com) with your name and email address as you want them to appear within Dopplr.

But if you suffer from Social Network Fatigue, I'll also continue posting travel info in my blog.  I'm happy to meet interesting people, as time allows.  And anyone who reads my writings must be interesting, right?  :-)

Interesting panels lined up for Connect conferences

The programs and panelists for this year's Connect conferences are pretty well developed, and session descriptions and participants' names are rapidly being filled in on the Connect conference web site.  You might want to check it out.

Day one of each conference is devoted to industry issues and innovative applications.  For industry issues, panelists have been selected to represent differing points of view, which typically results in edgy discussions and real controversy, both on stage and between panelists and members of the audience.  Some of the innovative applications have been a bit edgy as well, like this Virtual Girlfriend video telephony application exhibited at Connect 2006 in Europe.

Day two is a more traditional vendor-sponsored developer conference that targets NMS customers and prospects and delivers deep dives into NMS products and development tools.

Whether you are interested in day two or not, day one should be interesting for anyone in telecom.  Also, if you subscribe to this blog's RSS or email feeds, I'm incredibly flattered, and would like to meet you.  :-)

Finally, an IMS handset and service I can talk about

Samsung Handsets and AT&T's new Video Sharing Service

NMS Communications is an OEM-supplier to a wide variety of telecom players, so I always have interesting knowledge that I can't write about in this blog.  That's particularly the case with IMS handsets. Those who are paying attention (like Dean Bubley) realize that rich IMS services are being delayed awaiting IMS handsets.  Since NMS supplies IMS handset software to various handset vendors, very few of which are public, I know something about IMS handsets and handset availability — but usually I can't say anything...

However, with yesterday's Video Sharing announcement by AT&T, the last remaining piece in one set of our activities is now public, as AT&T provided information on their new IMS-based service, including the handsets it works with.

The Samsung handsets on the AT&T web page use our IMS client software.  Lucent (now Alcatel-Lucent) provides the IMS services infrastructure for AT&T (formerly Cingular) and indeed we had to do extensive interoperability testing with Lucent.  All this was well in hand in February 2006 when the NMS-Openera-Samsung press release went out, and yet it will be late this summer before AT&T Video Sharing service will be available in Boston.  Furthermore, Video Sharing is only of many IMS services that are possible with the Samsung handsets.

The good news is AT&T worries about their brand, so we can be sure their Video Sharing service will be robust.  The bad news is, there are all sorts of latent service capabilities in those handsets that have yet to see the light of day.  Meanwhile thousands of Internet-based services have popped up — many have failed, but the net rate of innovation is impressive.

When I look back at more than a decade of the Intelligent Network, it spawned a few widely deployed services, e.g. free phone service, premium rate service, mobile telephony (HLR/VLR), corporate VPNs, etc.  The services that were deployed were robust and scaled extremely well, but there were so few.

For now, IMS appears to be on the same track, unfortunately...

Before the end of 2007, I hope to be able to talk about a major shift in the world of handset software.  Things might look a bit different in 2008.

Patents: KSR v. Teleflex summary that even a congressman might understand

In April, the US Supreme Court unanimously rejected a rigid test of "obviousness" in determining patent validity in the case KSR Int’l Co. v. Teleflex Inc.  As a result, it becomes somewhat easier to invalidate a patent on the basis of "obviousness."  Indeed, by early May the Supreme's decision was already impacting lower court decisions as the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit (CAFC) affirmed a finding of obviousness in the case of  Leapfrog v. Fisher-Price.

A lot has been written about KSR v Teleflex in the legal press and in legal blogs, but yesterday I came across a good summary for the non-lawyer.  It's courtesy of the Congressional Research Service (CRS) which does research for congress.

Unfortunately, the CRS doesn't make their research available to the public in any convenient fashion.  Luckily, the Center for Democracy and Technology provides open access (and an RSS feed) for those CSR reports that are in the public domain.  It's quite a mix of, sometimes interesting, reports.

In this case, the CRS report is The Obviousness Standard in Patent Law:  KSR International Co. v. Teleflex Inc. by Brian T. Yeh, Legislative Attorney, American Law Division.

Build it and they will come - Railroads in the 19th century

While I was in Asia my wife picked up an 1860 original leather bound copy of "The Story of the Life of George Stephenson" by Samuel Smiles.  If you've never heard of George Stephenson, he's known for The Stockton and Darlington Railway which opened on the 27th of September 1825, The Liverpool and Manchester Railway which opened on the 15th of September 1830 and, with his son Robert Stephenson, for the engine "The Rocket" which won the first major locomotive contest in October 1830, also setting a speed record (29 mile per hour).

The Stockton and Darlington was designed to carry coal to a port at Stockton-on-Tees.  To quote Smiles,

At first passengers were not thought of; and it was only while the works were in progress that the starting of a passenger coach was seriously contemplated.  The number of persons traveling between the two towns was small and it was not known whether these would risk their persons upon an iron road. <...>

No sooner did the coal and merchandise trains begin to run regularly upon the line than new business relations sprang up between Stockton and Darlington and there were many more persons who found occasion to travel between the two towns — merchandise and mineral traffic invariably stimulating, if not calling into existence, an entirely new traffic in passengers.

In 1829 the line was extended to new docks five miles down the river where a new town (Middlesborough) grew from nothing to more than 6000 residents within ten years.

For the much more ambitious Liverpool and Manchester, the promoters based their calculations on heavy merchandise traffic (coal, cotton and timber) but also thought that they might be able to capture half of the 400 people per day carried by coaches between the two cities.  Again quoting Smiles,

But the railway was scarcely open before it carried on an average about 1200 passengers per day.

These were heady results that lead in due course to waves of investment (peaking in 1836-37 and in 1846) producing bubbles not unlike our Internet bubble. But despite investment bubbles, and busts, traffic continued to grow throughout the 19th century, literally transforming society. The parallels with the Internet are interesting.  Andrew Odlyzko tells the investments part of the story in section 4 of this article.

What the quotes from Smiles should suggest is we're unlikely to guess what form future advances based on the Internet will take.  Broadband Internet access is important for it's option value, not for the applications we run today.

Put another way, while I love railroads, the Internet's long term benefit for humanity is more significant — likely to rank up there with the introductions of speech, writing and the printing press.

Culture's impact on conferences and information exchange

As I write this, I’m attending an NMS seminar for about 100 developers in Seoul, Korea.  Ordinarily, before I speak to such an audience, I try to plant a question with a friendly in the audience, just to satisfy my western sensibilities — I don’t feel I’ve been successful if there are no questions from the audience.  But today I forgot (jet lag?), so no questions.  Of course there were no questions for the next four speakers, either.  I’m not a fan of generalizations, but this reflects a basic difference between Asian audiences and western audiences.

I see a similar effect in our Connect Conferences.  The US and EU Connect Conferences feature panel discussions with panel participants selected, in part, to generate controversy in the ensuing discussion.  The Asia Connect Conference has some of this, but a lot more straight presentations.

So how does information get transferred, aside from death by Powerpoint?  Certainly Asian development teams are every bit as productive as western teams, if not more so.

Over lunch I had a long conversation with a Korean engineering manager.  He had attended Columbia University in the US and was still impressed at how western students asked questions and Asian students were quiet.  When I pressed him on his current sources of information, his answers (paraphrased) were:

• Reading:  It’s important to have good documentation, white papers and tutorials available on the web.
• Webinars:  He doesn’t usually listen live, instead listening to recordings on the web at his convenience.
• One-on-one discussions:  Local, i.e. in-country, contacts are great, but he didn’t feel bashful about approaching me as he’d listened to me on a webinar and read some things I’d written.
• Conferences and seminars:  Especially those held locally.  These give him a chance to learn something and meet the manufacturer’s local representative, even if all questions are asked one-on-one.

From my perspective, it’s important to be accessible and to find ways to let people know I’m approachable.  This blog has helped, but so have my other articles, webinars, etc.  In fact, a common approach line is to thank me for something I’ve written and then move on to asking a question.

The biggest change, in the 15+ years I’ve been visiting Asia, has been the web.  Now it’s much easier to provide written material and it’s feasible to distibute audio and seminar presentations, i.e. webinars.  Now if only I could get over my craving for audience interaction…

 

Lifetime Prepaid — Paying a Little Extra to Reduce Hassles

Mobile Pundit pointed out this Economic Times article on a TRAI study of the first six months experience with “Lifetime prepaid” services in India.  Service adoption has been different than expected but, with hindsight :-), it makes perfect sense to me.

The original premise for lifetime prepaid was that poor people would be able to get a phone with which they could receive calls even if they couldn’t afford to make outgoing calls.  Since India is a caller-pays country, a laundry man, a paper recycler, or any other small time entrepreneur, would be able to advertise a phone number and receive calls from customers.

But the TRAI study found subscribers to Lifetime Prepaid services are not much different than any other subscriber.  72% recharge their phones every month and ARPU for lifetime prepaid subscribers is Rs 218 (~US$5.37) versus RS 261 (~US$6.43) for normal prepaid subscribers.  Yes, lifetime prepaid has tapped new customers, but it’s appeal is much broader than just the poor.  And this despite the fact that lifetime prepaid costs slightly more per minute for outgoing calls (Re.0.80 vs. Re.0.77) than regular prepaid.

The appeal here is the reduction in uncertainty.  It’s well established that people will pay extra to not have to worry about things.  That’s the reason monthly subscribers in the US buy bundles of minutes for much more than their actual monthly costs would be if they paid by the minute.

With lifetime prepaid you know you will keep the same phone number, even if something happened and you couldn’t afford to recharge your phone for a while.  If you’re middle class and want your driver and other servants to be reachable, here’s the perfect plan — you can get them phones and not worry about maintaining their service for them.  And if you live outside of India but want a phone for your twice yearly visits, what better way?  At every economic level, people want to reduce hassles in their lives and are willing to pay a bit extra for the privilege.

Good Analysis of xG Technology's claims for xMax Modulation

In late 2005, there was a flurry in the technical press about a Florida company, xG Technology, which claimed to have a new wireless technology with performance far surpassing 3G or anyone else’s 4G roadmap.  I happened to run into a friend who actually knew something (unfortunately under NDA) about the subject, so I got interested, scanned several patent applications filed by the founder, Joe Bobier, and wrote a blog post, xG Technology — Physics or Snake Oil?

At the time, I concluded that Joe Bobier might be well intentioned, but had no clue about digital communications theory.  On the other hand, he might have accidently stumbled on a loop hole in FCC regulations that might allow someone to legally transmit a spread spectrum signal that spreads across the entire spectrum below 3 GHz.

A few weeks ago, Phil Karn, commented on my blog post and pointed me at two excellent papers he’s written on the subject.  In xG Technology’s xMax, Phil examines the published information on xG’s November 2005 demonstration, works out the link budget including antenna gains, and taking account of the specified transmitter power and likely receiver performance, concludes:

The xMax demo may impress those who haven’t done the calculations and are unaware of how little power it takes to transmit digital data over a benign line-of-sight path.  But the same demonstrated performance could have been easily achieved with just about any conventional digital modulation scheme…

In his second paper, Bobier’s TriState Integer Cycle Modulation, Phil examines one of xG’s recent patents, US 7,003,047 and concludes it’s just frequency shift keying.  But Phil goes far beyond the cursory glance I did last year and provides a detailed analysis of this specific patent.  Although the title says “Tri-state” what is described is continuous phase, frequency shift keying with biphase coding.  Phil’s conclusion is simple and dead on:

… the techniques described in this patent are not novel, having been around for decades.  They cannot provide the advantages claimed by the inventor.

What’s more, while I haven’t gone back to scan the other Bobier patent filings, this one has zero chance of spreading the spectrum in any useful fashion.  The principal energy is on either side of the chosen carrier frequency — the patent suggests choosing two tones 30 KHz apart — and the resulting spectrum is very, very conventional.  So the one thought I had last year, about something neat they might be doing, doesn’t apply.

Traveling in Asia next week – AdvancedTCA

I'm leaving for a week in Asia to discuss AdvancedTCA with specific customers, partners and prospects in Korea, China and Japan.  If you are not familiar, AdvancedTCA refers to a set of open standards for telecom platforms, i.e. hardware (blades, racks, power, cooling, backplanes) and platform software (hardware management, carrier-grade OSs, high availability middleware).  It began within PICMG in 2001, but has now grown to include a series of cooperating organizations, each focused on a different part of an eco-system, as this chart from Intel illustrates.

Based on my experiences with CompactPCI in the 90s, the ATCA eco-system has taken longer to develop.  Indeed, I was showing early samples of NMS designed ATCA media blades to prospects in 2003-04, but it's only in late 2006 and this year that we've seen significant business opportunities.  With hindsight, there is a lot more capability in the ATCA eco-system (compared to CompactPCI) and there's been much more interaction with broad swaths of the telecom industry.  The good news is it appears the market has finally arrived and it will be bigger than CompactPCI ever was.

Is this better than the racks and racks of commodity 1U servers than Google uses?  No, it's different.  If your application requires only Intel MIPS, then Google's approach is the most cost effective.  However, custom silicon does a better job of packet forwarding, so high end routers are custom systems (or built on ATCA as this NEC mobile packet router is).  Similarly, DSPs can provide up to an order of magnitude better efficiency (computations per watt) for many media applications.  Other motivations for a telecom platform include telecom-specific line interfaces, high density interfaces and the ability for "crafts persons" in the central office to swap blades without interrupting service.  So, until recently communications gear was built on proprietary platforms.  Finally that's changing.  Every major equipment provider is using or evaluating AdvancedTCA and communications systems based on ATCA are coming to market.

At NMS we productized and released the industry's first ATCA media blade, the MG 7000A, late last year.  Now we're out seeking feedback on our ATCA product strategy, thus this trip to Asia.  So in quick succession, I'll be in Seoul Korea, Nanjing and Guangzhou in China and then on to Tokyo on Thursday evening and back to the US on Saturday the 16th.

Michael Stanford on Brough Turner on Network Neutrality

A few weeks ago, Michael Stanford and I had a brief email exchange on Network Neutrality.  In it I gave my current thoughts and included some links to blog posts I've written, over the past 2+ years, touching on Internet access and/or network neutrality.  The problem of course, is that it's my blog, so I've written short posts, mostly in response to things I'd just read.  Nowhere are the posts organized, and I've certainly never written a proper paper on the subject.

Now I'm flattered to find that Michael has written, in his wirevolution blog, an excellent summary of my various posts entitled "Brough Turner on Network Neutrality."  I should probably write that paper, but thanks to Michael's review, I now have an excellent excuse for further delay.  :-)

VoIP - Beyond Digital POTS

I've been involved with VoIP technology since 1996.  I've been a public advocate for wideband audio at least since 1997.  And I've admired and supported a variety of companies using VoIP to provide innovative services and new user interfaces.  But reflecting on the past decade, the only globally significant impact of VoIP has been on prices (by fostering arbitrage).  Most VoIP telephony services are just digital POTS.

Indeed, the most significant change in telephony in the past decade has been the global spread of mobile phones.

But we may be on the cusp of a real change due to the merger of VoIP and mobile as I discussed in my monthly column, entitled Beyond Digital POTS, in the April issue of Internet Telephony magazine.  Check the article for further info, but I concluded with:

The remaining impediments are walled gardens or expensive data plans, and handset diversity that means most applications won’t run on most handsets. Mobile competition, WiFi hotspots and ever increasing 3G capabilities should put an end to walled gardens within two to five years. Handset diversity will be with us, perhaps indefinitely, but a few powerful frameworks are gaining ground at different levels of abstraction, e.g.Symbian and Windows Mobile at a base level, J2ME as middleware and Flash Lite and Opera & Safari browsers with AJAX. There won’t be a single API to write to (like Windows for the PC), but it should be possible to produce slick user interfaces across a wide variety of phones with a proxy server and five or six downloadable modules.

VoIP and mobile — now there’s an opportunity for innovation!