[opendtv] Re: Skype forces AT&T into mVoIP game
- From: "Manfredi, Albert E" <albert.e.manfredi@xxxxxxxxxx>
- To: "opendtv@xxxxxxxxxxxxx" <opendtv@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Tue, 27 Jul 2010 14:43:32 -0500
Craig Birkmaier wrote:
> The notion that VoIP will take over the traditional voice telephony
> market is not news. The telcos have seen this coming for years, just as
> they saw that wired telephony was going to give way to wireless.
Agreed. Some telcos, notably in Scandinavia, initially saw IP telephony as
something they could use in their own backbones. And the wireless part, well,
the original Star Trek series of the 1960s had that all figured out already.
> This reminds me of Nicholas Negroponte's quote (at the beginning of the
> '90s) that the infrastructure is upside down - " phones should be
> wireless and TVs should be connected to wires."
I don't buy that. My take is, everything should be wireless, if it's
technically feasible to do so, because it removes a huge labor-intensive
component from the equation. Anything that is one-way broadcast is a natural
for wireless. RF bandwidth constraints may be less severe in one-way broadcast.
Two-way nets are a different matter, because of scaling concerns. Two-way in
large scale requires either wires to the end user, or short range wireless
links to end users, backed up by a hefty backhaul network. Which backhaul
network is most likely wired. So the heavy lifting in a large scale two-way
network is still provided by wires, most likely.
The point of that piece, as far as I'm concerned, is that you could say, "Why
would the telcos agree to bypass their lucrative switched voice service in
favor of VoIP?" And the answer is, because that's what consumers want.
Consumers have been discovering VoIP in the wired world, and they want it
wireless too. All it takes is for one telco to get smart and offer that sort of
service, and the rest will eventually have to follow.
Same could be applied to the dual revenue streams of TV, if consumers stand
their ground and if the single revenue stream services get the shackles taken
off.
Bert
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