rradina
join:2000-08-08
Chesterfield, MO | reply to fiberguy
Re: Unfair Comparison With regard to Vonage, not only are they scrambling but one of the AT&T head honchos said he's tired of Vonage "using his lines for free." He's trying to convince our legislators that somehow Vonage is getting a free ride and that they should not vote for net neutrality. If the backbone providers have their way, Vonage will be paying $10/month per customer to the backbone providers and then their prices will be "competitive" with regular telcos.
If net neutrality becomes law, I would look for voice and possibly even video communications to become essentially free. Right now Vonage's big play is that they connect VOIP users to the traditional POTS system. Once VOIP is in the majority, look for that interconnect to become increasingly less valuable. Once almost everyone is VOIP, you won't need Vonage in the middle and voice will be free just like Skype is today between all VOIP customers. If this happens, the ILECs will no longer have voice business.
The next industry to suffer will be wireless cell carriers. If WiFi becomes pervasive and continues to advance both speed and the reliability, VOIP wins again. The cellular carriers will also become "dumb" pipes as folks use it for mobile Internet access over which they use VOIP to make their calls.
What we have now is a panic and everyone is trying to figure out how to get their meat hooks into regulation or lack thereof so they can leverage their monopolies to stay in the game. |
