I’m catching up with my news feeds, some quick shorts.
Disrupt from below
I notice that Uniden (of cordless phone fame) are getting into household VoIP.
If I were a big-name cellular handset manufacturer, I’d be worried. A Wi-Fi phone unencumbered by the history and price-discrimination of a carrier could start to sprout some pretty compelling features. Then disrupt upwards; people bring the phone to their vacation house, workplace and relatives. It’s portable. Then a municipal or next-generation mobile wireless broadband network launches, and you take your home phone with you, not your old cell phone.
Flarion abandoned
Sprint-Nextel abandons Flarion trial. Predictable. If you’re the guy in Lenexa, KS choosing a network technology, remember you have two options: A. EV-DO. Doesn’t do VoIP well, reverse link doesn’t scale well, laggy, needs an army of network engineers. B. FLASH-OFDM. More symmetric, low latency, ideal for VoIP. Perfect wireless stupid network. Few network engineers needed.
You choose A, every time.
Bundled telecom
So, BT have responded to OFCOM’s challenge to design their own regulatory shackles. Unsurprisingly, they chose the, um, successful American model. Basically, local loop unbundling (LLU) is a dud. You need local loop transfer (LLT). Get it back in the hands of the users, who then contract someone to maintain and connect it for them. Might be individual, might be en-masse. All LLU does is keep pricing in the political arena, and BT’s lawyers know how to play that game better than anyone. LLU is not free market competition, just a facsimile of it.
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