James Enck compares and contrasts the way Vonage and Telio approached the financial market. That well may be the case – what do I know about that. But one particular claim in their roadshow material caught my attention and I am taking an issue with them.
In their attempt to show their value proposition (page 6), they claim that they offer (could?) new services. But they do not stop there; they go further and claim that “New services are not possible on PSTN”. Probably they add some qualifications during the presentation. Absent that this statement borders on bravado. As I have stated many times before in this blog, there are only a handful of things that can be done in IP world that can not be replicated in PSTN. To get a full list of features Telio offers to their customers, I visited their site. But unfortunately I am not able to discern them due to language differences. I am guessing they are the usual laundry list, which are easily realizable. This of course includes “Keep your number for life”.
If you allow me to have a box that costs less than half what an ATA costs, I can have many of these “new found” features in PSTN as well. I really hope we stop creating schism between PSTN and IP Communications and focus on creating value for the consumers. Indeed, true IP Communications includes PSTN as a “sub-network”.
Posted by aswath at June 3, 2006 12:20 PM
Technically, yes ... but if we take "PSTN" to be the wider system, including the pricing models, interconnect, settlement, etc -- then we can see that progress is basically impossible. How to get consensual agreement on a new feature being deployed? There's no possibility of incremental exploration of features that impact 2 calling parties, for example. A Vonage, Skype or PhoneGnome do allow such innovation (although not all choose to execure on it). Also, VoIP does make it technically simpler to unbundle the components of the service (e.g. select your own voicemail) - it's just a different URI in the config file, not a software update to a thousand switches needing a ton of systems management.
That said, it is amazing how feeble the telcos have been in improving the voice product, even when in vigorous competition (e.g. in cellular).
Posted by: Martin Geddes at June 4, 2006 03:52 AM