I’ve been reading an interminable discussion over at El Reg on cyber-terrorism.
Now, there only seem to be two really significant threats:
The first threat is fairly easily contained. Such systems tend to be bespoke, complex and relatively simple to secure using well-known techniques. Thus they are amenable to only localized attack. Serious as that is, it won’t end civilization as we know it.
The second threat can be contained too. Separation of applications was achieved in mainframes and Unix in the 1970s. Journalization of changes and the ability to replay changes was a solved problem when I was still working out how walk and talk. The only missing piece is for Bill Gates’s minions to pull their fingers out and implement an operating system where the OS and applications are safe from stomping on each other; each piece of data has a responsible application (which we have today with default handlers); any application can read data; but applications that don’t own the data need the permission of the user or controlling application to make updates; and any updates can be reversed (‘cos storage is cheap cheap cheap, and we can store a lot of changes in our undo buffer.)
Hey! Sounds like an Oracle database…
The always-on hyper-connected world isn’t going to result in a cataclysm. It’s a telepocalypse for the voice carriers, not a telegeddon for the public.
Posted by Martin Geddes at 10:25 AMTrackBack URL for this entry:
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Fact: People are paying for Vonage, (and even more for regular POTS lines)
The name of the business is arbitrage, a real business that may not last very long but can be very profitable for a while.
Until everyone is getting telephony for "zero" there is money to be made by the Vonage's and Packet8's of the world.
Posted by: at March 5, 2004 10:55 PMHow will it ever go to zero?
Posted by: at March 7, 2004 09:08 AMThere will never be free phone calls. The bells will allways be in the middle of you and granny!
Posted by: at March 8, 2004 09:46 AMThe customer acquisition costs of Vonage are the killer. Those Circuit City channels are not cheap to operate. I'd be surprised if they can sustain enough revenue to cover their sales and marketing costs. The cost of adapter boxes for analog phones is so low that even if they are locked to one service provider they are no real barrier to churn, unlike with cell phones.
The end-user cost of "speak to someone not physically present" is already heading towards zero. There's no Bell between me and my daughter's granny in London -- I bought the oldies broadband and we now use Skype.
All-you-can-eat pricing plans are really a bundled connectivity fee and a service fee -- almost all of which represents connectivity (and crappy government taxes). The service revenues from voice will be zero real quick. In fact, a voice connection may be worth less than an IP one, given the flexibility of IP.
Posted by: at March 10, 2004 09:33 PMvonage and the likes need a new biz model, find another way to generate the revenue to make up for the fees that connect to the ptsn ....it seems to me that the arbitrage game is short lived?
Posted by: at March 11, 2004 10:37 AM