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Roy Schestowitz <newsgroups@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> espoused:
> Disruptive technology.
>
> Is the telephone apocalypse now?
>
> ,----[ Quote ]
>| Chris LymanChris Lyman is certain of it.
>|
>| He told me yesterday that Fonality's PBXtra is just that, the
>| end not just of traditional telephony but of traditional
>| telephony channels.
> `----
>
> http://blogs.zdnet.com/open-source/?p=833
>
>
> VoIPowering Your Office with Asterisk: Shiny New Asterisk 1.4
>
> ,----[ Quote ]
>| Digium has released the Asterisk 1.4 beta. New! Shiny! Improved! This
>| is the first major update since 1.2 was launched over a year ago.
> `----
>
> http://www.voipplanet.com/backgrounders/article.php/3640866
>
> No wonder Verizon et al want to start taxing traffic/services (charging by
> the byte).
What's wrong with charging by the byte, though? This is the only way in
which net neutrality can be maintained. If you don't do that, the 10%
leech users will get 90% of the bandwidth at the expense of 90% of the
paying customers, which is fundamentally broken.
Basic telecoms costs come in a fixed part and variable part, covering
local loop, duct, fibre, power, backup-power, alarm management,
operational stations, spares, spares logistics, integration costs
and licensing fees to suppliers, network stresses associated with
actually moving traffic, network planning, re-arrangement, provisioning
(of customers and links), billing, commissioning of new plant and new
services & capabilities. The more you consume, the more that many of
those costs are directly or indirectly increased.
The profit margins of fixed-line telcos have now fallen to < 10%, and
are still falling. Soon they will be lower than those of high-street
supermarkets, unless the trend can be shifted. This means that they're
operating in a commoditised world, and commodity thinking must be
applied. In commodities, if you use more, you pay more, or the supplier
goes out of business.
10 years ago, AT&T were the world's largest telco, but they didn't
face up to the market shifts, continuing to behave as if they had luxury
provider margins. Last year, they went *out of business*. AT&T went
bust. Everyone seems to have swept this rather embarassing fact under
the carpet, but it does illustrate what happens when you ignore basic
economics.
So, you might think, well, who cares? AT&T got it wrong and they went
bust. Well, okay, it's a perspective, but as a model, it's not
sustainable. The investment made in AT&T was squandered, its assets
being sold on for rather less than they'd paid for them. AT&T
essentially provided a subsidy for SBC, and for SBC's customers. This
can only be repeated a few times until there's noone left whose money
you can grab. At that point, someone will have to start paying for what
this stuff /actually costs/.
What Asterisk is good for is for showing up the enormous margins and
lock-ins enjoyed by traditional vendors of PBX equipment. The network
operators would sell these on, but the cost of the PBX would be part of
the "cost of sale", ie., the customer would pay. From a network
operator's viewpoint, traffic is traffic, there's no reason why type a
or type b should be charged for differently - a bit is a bit is a bit,
no matter *what* higher layer protocol it's residing in. This is much
the same argument as why linux and FLOSS are a good thing, they
highlight the huge costs and lock-ins of proprietary software. But it's
not the retailers of the software who get the blame for this, so why do
we blame operators for the pricing activities of PBX vendors? And come
to that, we don't expect retailers to treat linux PCs any differently
from Windows PCs, so why should we expect network operators to treat one
bit or byte differently from another?
--
| Mark Kent -- mark at ellandroad dot demon dot co dot uk |
Joe's sister puts spaghetti in her shoes!
|
|
