Bruce Stewart’s doing great work over at the Emerging Telephony blog. I loved this snippet from his interview with France Telecom’s Norman Lewis (emphasis mine):
Stewart: Who thinks they own this space: the Telcos, the ISPs, or the Google/Yahoo/EBay trinity?
Lewis: Actually no-one but the customer ‘owns this space’. If there’s anything we should learn from history is that user behaviour and social forces will determine the shape of this space in the future. Just remember the first predictions on telephony itself!
But there is a sea change taking place. Telcos have begun to understand that voice is simply another data service over wireless or wired networks and that this migration of voice into the application layer opens voice to competition from other application-level players, such as portals. Though it appears GTalk, Y! Messenger, AIM, MSN Messenger and eBay’s Skype could commoditise Telcos as simple pipe-providers, it should be remembered that Telco expertise in identity and authentication, quality of service, convergence, billing and customer care, places them in a strong and potentially dominant position. This space will become hotly contested: Telcos believe they can maintain their positions while ISPs, MNOs, portals and others believe they too can occupy this space and thus overturn old hegemonies.
‘Telcos’ in the traditional sense of the term will not occupy this space. VOIP is destroying existing business models and they will be disintermediated. But in the words of Lawrence of Arabia, ‘nothing is written’ – yesterday’s Telcos can transform themselves if they recognize this threat and become 21st Century converged communication platforms.
Norm’s keynoting at the Emerging Telephony conference. It’s fascinating to think of telcos as having strengths in identity, QoS, and customer care. I certainly noticed that the ISP I worked for became more like a telco the longer it was in business: a call center helpdesk, online account checking, online status checking, they’re even offering voice services now. I’d love to survey customers about their experiences with phone companies and ISPs: who has the better service? Who gives better value for money? Who would the customer rather put their business with?
ISPs have acquired many of the skills of telcos (any ISP still in business has become very good about billing!), and now they’re looking hard at identity. Can the Internet crew out-innovate the Telco crew and be the first to converge on a single platform offering that is high-quality and does no evil toward the user? The best part about VoIP, in my opinion, is that it breaks down the barriers to entry; it’s now possible for garage startups to write applications that before were only the result of dedicated multiyear multimillion dollar projects at carriers. And with US communications alone a $700+ billion market, it’s mighty attractive to developers.