I love reading Orlowski's stuff, if only because of the resentful bitterness and relentless cynicism.
He posits:
It's small, it's boring and won't turn any heads - but it probably spells the end of the road for Skype, Vonage and any other hopeful independent VoIP companies. It's Nokia's 6136 phone, which allows you to make calls over your home or office Wi-Fi network, as well as on a regular cellular network. UMA, or unlicensed mobile access, is the mobile operators' answer to the threat of VoIP - and now it's reality.
UMA basically lets you treat your wi-fi access point as a cellular site and do hand-offs. Kinda, sorta, with lots of messy interaction of tightly-coupled network layers.
Whilst it makes for a great headline ("Skype and Vonage: thank you, and goodnight"), the article is what is technically known over here in Britain as utter bollocks. (Well, if Andrew doesn't expect to get as good as he gives...)
There are two reasons: the theoretical one, and the practical one.
Theory first. Skype != telephony. It's got other, useful, stuff. Presence, meta-presence, file transfer, IM, web presence, rich directory, wideband audio, blahdyblah. Even if "telephony" is free, it's still crap. And there's no guarantee the operator arm-lock on the mobile handsets specs and their distribution will last out. Ultimately, the big handset makers are going to have to deliver what the real customers want, and clever operators will find ways to board the cluetrain before the last service departs. Powerful retail intermediaries like Carphone Warehouse and Radio Shack have clout, and aren't in the business of sustaining operator control-freak fantasies.
UMA is just seasoning on the basic bland telephony product. Skype is real, red meat. Yum.
Then the practical side. WiFi is truly dreadful to provision. Lots of people won't even know their own access point name among the 5 "Linksys" ones in the street. They've long forgotten the password their son-in-law set up two years ago and is nicely cached in their laptop. Access points have all sorts of wonderful, subtle incompatibilities when it comes to security features. They tend to overheat and fall over rather too often. The antenna may be oriented to give good coverage in the "laptop" work area, but not necessarily the whole property. The access you have at work requires a different set of network authentication, and is firewalled off. The access at the coffee shop is highly contended at times. Most commercial access points only offer a "port 80" splash screen, wholly incompatible with getting online via a phone screen. (Bundled connectivity services like Skype Zones will probably only take off when given away as a draw to specific retail outlets.) I think you're getting the point: this stuff isn't easy to set up.
So you're probably going to have to supply your own pre-provisioned access point as part of your UMA bundle. Which only works in one location. And shoulder all the technical support costs of installation. That means you're spending cash to help users more rapidly move towards the open IP world, where you've no coherent strategy or control. Maybe the decreased churn and spectrum costs make the economics work. But I suspect that this isn't anything like the commercial holocaust Orlowski predicts.
Whatever its mis-steps and warts, Skype is a child of the Stupid Network, and the phone companies don't have a viable plan yet to fight it or co-opt it. UMA just prolongs the hallucination that control over the network's use can be sustained and extended. Vonage is a legacy telephony zombie disguised in Internet Protocol bandages wrapped around its body. But that ghoulish business won't need UMA to finish it off, anyway.
Metered telephony? No thank you, and goodnight.
Posted by Martin Geddes at 9:49 PMTrackBack URL for this entry:
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