Here in Vilnius the snow is only a few inches deep, but the reflected light brightens up the dull northern European winter. (Many North Americans seemed surprised to learn that millions of Europeans live at the same latitude as Hudson Bay.) I’ve also just made a rather unusual phone call back to the UK that dispels some telecom gloom.
Naked DSL has yet to be forced onto BT by the UK regulator, so millions of people are paying about 10 quid a month for POTS service that they may or may not want. The UK has a very vigorous market in carrier pre-select and prefix dialling codes: I can call people in the US far cheaper than most US residents can call across their own state. UK national calls are as little as 1p (US$0.02), unmetered. We’ve already opted out of BT’s usurious pricing plan for another pre-select operator.
(And if you want two more reasons who Vonage is ****** in the UK market, you’ve just got them. Throw in cheap cable triple play bundles and you’ve completed your trifecta. You have to make the IP services do something genuinely new to make money.)
BT has teamed up with Yahoo! to offer VoIP, semi-integrated with Yahoo’s IM client. I can’t say it’s the most reliable product ever offered. It fumbles NAT and firewall traversal. It stumbles at start-up asking you to classify the speed of your broadband connection. It tumbles when the IP connection drops and restarts. But it more or less works, and the voice quality is superior to SkypeOut. Plus callers get to see your home phone number as caller ID, and there’s no hassle in having the charged tacked onto your PSTN bill.
So I called my folks back in London. Spoke for ten minutes. Ended the call. (My parents’ PC is knackered, hence the non-Skype nature of the call, for the astute among you wondering what I’m doing making regular landline calls.)
Nothing unusual there, you say. But wait a minute — didn’t I just opt out of BT’s voice service with carrier pre-select? Only for circuit-switched calls made from my physical home line. VoIP does an end-run around all those regulations.
And quite rightly so, too. BT’s only market power in VoIP is their billing capability for 20 million accounts. I’m better off having just made the call and not paid Lietuvos Telekomas their truly outrageous rates. BT’s better off. And my carrier-preselect operator had every opportunity to capture the billable event, and declined to even try.
I wonder how long it will be until other utility companies catch on to the fact that their telecom asset is their billing capability. Why not tack VoIP calls onto your electricity bill?
Their disadvantage compared to BT is that BT knows for sure what my number is, and doesn’t have to carry the costs of validating it (or the risk of spoofing the caller ID to whatever I tell them my number is.) So if you’re a regulator worried about making rules on VoIP, how about starting with the ownership structure of phone numbers,? That would help to brighten up the competition.
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