Disruptive Voice

Telcos must open their networks to survive & thrive

Venerable tech columnist Walt Mossberg of the Wall Street Journal told a room full of telecom executives today that new mobile devices like the 3G iPhone and the G1 Google Android phone mark "a great moment of opportunity and significant challenge for the telecom industry."

With the transformation of mobile devices into handheld computers, telcos could be limited to being nothing but a network provider. Such was the prediction that Mossberg delivered to attendees of BroadSoft Connections in Scottsdale, Arizona.

Joining Mossberg was Jeff Cavins, who leads mobile app provider CallWave; Shawn Hardin, who heads social networking browser Flock.com; and Emily Green, the president of the Yankee Group research firm.

Mossberg began the session by holding up a humongous old Motorola portable phone to illustrate just how far mobile handsets and services have come. Part of the panel’s message was that telecom companies want to hold on to outdated business models, and consequently are being relegated to becoming little more than a pipe.

While telcos want to be part of the Web 2.0 evolution that is occurring, the changes are coming faster than they can alter their internal cultures to take advantage of new innovations. And, the panel said, telcos have to abandon their walled-garden approach to services that once made Internet pioneers like AOL successful, but eventually left them grasping for sustainability.

Green said telcos continue to focus on reliability at a time when consumers put up with mediocre service from mobile carriers in exchange for convenience. Choice, she said, is the dominant factor in consumer decision making.

Mossberg said so far Apple and Google have gotten it right: open the platform to innovation and let new, exciting things happen. For telcos to survive, they will have to open their networks to allow user-driven applications become part of the next generation of telecom services.

Happy Birthday Skype

Two weeks ago, Skype celebrated its 5^th anniversary. For the telecom industry, the birth of Skype on August 29, 2003, marked a milestone in telephony evolution: the beginning of the public’s mass adoption of IP-based telephony.

 

Skype says the more than 100 billion Skype-to-Skype call minutes over the last five years and more than 338 million registered users have made it profitable. Later this year, Skype will roll out its Skype Out service to the British and Italian customers of wireless carrier 3. Skype Out will allow 3's Skype customers to call the home and wireless phones of non-Skype users.

 

Consumer comfort with using a non-traditional fixed-line phone service allowed U.S. cable companies to effectively grab market share from teleco giants with their digital voice offerings. Cable’s rapid growth in telephony services (with nearly 6 million customers, Comcast is poised to become the third largest phone carrier in the U.S.) has helped traditional phone companies begrudgingly see the potential for carrier-grade VoIP services.

 

So, Happy Birthday, Skype.

Videoconferencing is ‘Creepy’

A recent Boston Globe article noted that videoconferencing vendors are seeing rapid growth in sales, because companies are trying to reduce their travel expenses. But the cost of videoconferencing solutions remain prohibitive for the majority of companies – small and medium businesses. Not many SMBs can pony up $200,000 plus 15 percent for maintenance for Cisco’s videoconferencing. 

 

But expense is not the only thing holding back the adoption of videoconferencing. Frederick Paul of bMighty.com got the videoconferencing vendors themselves to admit that the migration from the conference call to the videoconference creeps people out. Folks can hide on a conference call. They can IM with their buddies, finish the report they have procrastinated doing or even pick their nose. And if you don’t understand the discussion, you can just stay silent. But with videoconferencing, there’s no hiding.

 

Then there’s human vanity. How many videoconference calls start late because participants are in the restroom checking their hair or making sure they do not have spinach in their teeth? And with high definition videoconferencing, the prospect of protruding nose hairs might become reason for concern. People also are unsure about how to act: should they stand when speaking, clasp their hands, look at the camera at all times? This video pokes fun at how being seen on a screen causes people to make fools of themselves.

How can videoconferencing be made less “creepy” for businesses?