The current efforts by local telcos and some governement regulatory bodies to regulate Vonage and other VoIP efforts just like local telcos is misguided, and it will probably be fairly easy for existing and emerging VoIP providers to avoid such classification. Currently, the Vonages of the world certainly appear to be telcos....they provide nothing but telephony services and give you all sorts of local telco type things like call forwarding, call waiting, etc. Fine; sounds like a telco to me. But what happens when companies like Skype and others start to combine IM capabilties with VoIP, or start to add VoIP as another element to online gaming on the XBox or networked PS/2? If i'm shouting "i just scored another touchdown on your week defense" to my opponent in new mexico while we play NCAA football, is that really a "phone call"?
It seems to me that the local telcos are really in trouble, but that they'll be able to keep the monster at bay in the very near term while many of the VoIP providers are telephony pure plays. Once VoIP is just another channel in a combined solution, however, SBC and others are gonna have to hope their DSL and data businesses can carry the load.....and darn if I don't find that funny.
Posted by Dick at October 15, 2003 11:01 AM | TrackBack