We went to a party at the weekend. A PhD graduation celebration for one of my wife's friends. When you've been incarcerated with a ten-month old baby for, well, ten months, such social stimulation is most welcome. Unfortunately my conversation skills no longer extend beyond pointing at things and naming them. But no matter, a good time was had by all.
My wife's friend (from Finland, blonde, owns a Nokia phone, don't you love stereotypes) has two young cats, both from the same litter. Their pelts are very different colors, but when they stand together you can see the almost identical bone structure in their faces. They have the lean, focused look of hunters.
We learned a great trick at the party, one you can use to amaze friends and alarm neighbors at your own social gatherings. The trick requires three readily available ingredients. One. A laser pointer. Two. A carpeted floor, for plenty of claw traction. And three. A minimum of one cat.
The method is to shine the laser pointer in front of the cat. Cat pounces on laser spot. Spot moves rapidly back and forth. Cat moves rapidly back and forth. Spot moves in circles. Cat whizzes around like a spinning top. Cruel? Maybe. Fun? Absolutely.
Anyway, enough of that. In my inbox this morning was a link to the well-trailed news that Skype plan to offer paid-for interconnect to the PSTN (thanks, Robin). Now, Skype have also been getting into the hardware business, so this isn't the only string to their bow. But it highlights once again the fallacy that there is a future for recurring service revenue from vanilla VoIP. There isn't any.
For the hard of thinking, I'll recap the argument once again. The customer with a broadband connection has already paid postage and packing for the bitstream that carries the voice call. Increasingly, the public Internet is capable of moving those bits with acceptable latency and jitter to any other broadband-connected user anywhere else in the world. The result? High-quality full-duplex interactive audio, previously known as a phone call.
The only centrally mediated function is turning the persistent identifier of the callee into an IP address. That name could be a phone number, proprietary network identifier (like in Skype) or an IM/e-mail address. This look-up has a cost structure of close to zero. Anyone can create a competing namespace. And the phone number namespace is already regulated to prevent ownership by any one commercial entity. So no profit goldmine hiding under the mat there. Only a transient self-defeating market for VoIP to PSTN interconnect. The more VoIP there is, the less need for payment of tributes to centrally managed faux-circuit-switched service providers.
There's commercial value in creating new services, new customer hardware, and maybe even in the connectivity itself on a good day. There's also value in preventing unwanted connections. But not in recreating a dead business model of circuit voice.
So if you're looking to invest your own money in the VoIP boom, just be careful. You might be chasing prey that doesn't exist.
Posted by Martin Geddes at 11:40 PMTrackBack URL for this entry:
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