Lately, Long Tail has been referenced a lot. Today Tom Evslin has written an excellent summary of the idea behind it. As Tom points out IP technology makes Long Tail happen. But so far it has not happened to voice communication. The purpose of this note is to suggest one way.
Till now, the major source of commercial activity seems to be in interconnecting to PSTN. But, the charges vary widely and no single provider is uniformly cheaper. For example, Skype charges $0.02 per minute for calls to US whereas Gizmo Project charges $0.017; Skype charges $0.15 per minute to India, whereas Gizmo Project charges $0.23. To call India, one can use Reliance from a PSTN phone and its charges are $0.13. For comparison, AT&T charges $0.23. This suggests that each provider is getting different wholesale rate for different countries, possibly based on the traffic load.
Long Tail suggests that consumers must be able to reach the appropriate interconnect carrier for the specific destination. Of course we do this in PSTN with two stage dialing. SIP makes it easy to do in a single message exchange. But almost all clients do not have a mechanism and VoIP service providers do not allow users to connect other interconnect providers. PhoneGnome, which bills itself a product and also does not offer its own interconnection service, is a possibility. I am not sure whether currently they allow this or they limit only one interconnect provider.
Posted by aswath at October 14, 2005 06:02 PM
PhoneGnome lets you have two interconnect providers --> one for in-country long distance, and one for international long distance. I am not sure why they did it that way.
Posted by: Alec Saunders at October 15, 2005 07:52 AMI knew that they allow one in-country and one international long distance. I was suggesting more freedom. For example, I may need one interconnect provider for India, another for Country X and so on. Since I can provision it on My Account page, there is no need to place any restriction.
Posted by: Aswath at October 15, 2005 12:17 PMPerhaps the Long Tail in VoIP will surface when we truly have widespread deployment of services, instead of the common basket of services the phone companies provides now. Signalling in the VoIP field is fairly open, the signalling within the PSTN needs to be opened up to allow this long tail. PINT and SPIRITS, anyone?
Posted by: Manoj Sati at October 15, 2005 01:11 PMI agree with you Aswath. I want the freedom to do much more.
Posted by: Alec Saunders at October 15, 2005 11:51 PMAFAIK, PhoneGnome is the first product to attempt to give both control/flexibility to the consumer and ease-of-use. I believe it is the only "complete solution" that that let's one select third-party providers at all. To say nothing of letting one pick different providers for LD vs. Intl.
This is the first production release of PhoneGnome. We wanted to find a sweet spot of features and still keep it simple to setup and use for the first pass. One could add features forever and never release a product.
PhoneGnome will continually be improving with new features and functions. What gets on the roadmap and when is very much driven by demand. We often have a major struggle between keeping things simple and practical for real people, and providing a lot of flexibility and control for advanced users. These are two diverse constituencies with different needs and wants. Even the current level of flexibility in selecting multiple PSTN terminatiion services is challenging for some users who would want *fewer* choices.
In terms of providing more discretion in selecting different providers for different regions, it's on the roadmap too, but again, it has to be weighed against all the other feature requests and the ease-of-use component.
Also, there is a reliability component in adding complexity and features. As they say when buidling race cars: "if the part isn't there it can't fail." A key factor of PhoneGnome is that it be easy to use, and that it just works. If we make things too complex for people, they themselves can break their own PhoneGnome (say if forwarding is too complex, or even the multiple PSTN termination provider thing we're discussing).
Anyway, in short, anything you see with PhoneGnome today doesn't mean it is the last word. PhoneGnome features and capabilities will continually improve and expand. If you have ideas, please let us know and I assure you that we will use that feedback to inform our future development decisions.
Posted by: David Beckemeyer at October 16, 2005 01:45 PM