Telepocalypse

Three is the magic number

Via SIPthat I notice that the Koreans are issuing phone numbers for IP telephony from a reserved range. What makes this interesting is that they are only being issued to operators whose calls meet certain minimum quality criteria.

Does anyone else see the irony of this? Firstly we've seen an explosion of cellular usage despite the grossly inferior voice quality. Nobody blinked at giving out phone numbers to mobile phones. We now even give out numbers to data cards merely so they can be provisioned on networks where the phone number is a required identifier -- even if they can't ever make or take a call. Expats around the world happily make free VoIP calls of questionable quality to keep in touch.

To me it's a classic way of excluding competitors, particularly P2P networks where there is no operator to certify. It also descends into meaninglessness when you consider that the key determinan of voice quality is the connection's bandwith, jitter, latency, and application contention, none of which are under the control of the service operator.

I look forward to this Korean innovation being copied by incumbents around the world. Yo Korea! Leading us on into the broadband revolution... two steps forward and one step back.