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April 20, 2004

Copper vs. copper

No surprises that the cablecos are trying to gang up on the telcos, as documented by the ITU Strategy and Policy Unit. NeuStar are going to be the ENUM directory provider. The idea is that the calls between cablecos are kept 100% VoIP and don't go anywhere near the PSTN.

Eventually the public are going to discover that the sole "voice" function they've bought is the mapping of a phone number to an IP address. This isn't any harder than DNS, which comes for free with any Internet connection. The Internet is perfectly capable of doing the haulage.

Repetez apres moi: The correct price for point-to-point voice service is zero. There is no such thing as the "market for VoIP calls". It's a mirage. The cost structure is lower than (zero marginal cost) email. There isn't even anything to store. This is a race to nowhere.

Posted by Martin Geddes at 11:19 PM
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