Yesterday @desarls mentioned about a blog post titled "How the FCC Killed VoIP" by Alex Goldman. This post is a rebuttal where I argue that during the past decade the VoIP industry acted less a revolutionary segment (though it talked all the right talk) and aped the incumbents (though it derided them whenever it could).
I hope you read Alex’s post, but let me summarize the post with this representative statement he makes there: “VoIP has been fenced in by the FCC so that it offers no more than telephone, a moved [sic] that was intended to protect cellular and wireline phone companies.” He goes on to detail how E911 order, Universal Service Fee and CALEA requirements placed an enormous burden on VoIP service providers, especially smaller ones. He says that these regulations have constricted VoIP to be replacement of wireline phone service of the previous century. But he fails to note that these regulations are only for “interconnected” services. Nobody is forced to be an interconnected service provider. Skype has simply decoupled “In” and “Out” services and seems to have successfully avoided the need to comply to these regulations. Why can’t other providers do the same.
More importantly, these providers by issuing an ATA and asking their customers to connect a “standard telephone”, I contend that it is the service providers who are asking their customers to view themselves as a replacement service. It is the service providers who reinforce this further by issuing just phone numbers. Let us compare how email providers rolled out the service a couple of decades back. At that time, email advocates ridiculed postal service, just like VoIP advocates deride the incumbents. But they didn’t use postal address as email address; they didn’t suggest that they will transcribe written letters to email format, just because that is what the customers are used to. They took the bold step of requiring necessary modifications to user experience and user interface so as not to stifle the services the technology can offer. To be sure, the adoption may have been was slow, but once it is adopted, email service provided a totally, radically different service.
So what features and services that VoIP providers could have offered, FCC regulations or not?
Since VoIP out-of-band signalling mechanism, many services that Plain Old Telephone Service can not hope to offer. A caller can find out called user’s availability in a less intrusive manner rather than asking in person. But standard telephone/ATA combination does not allow for this. SIP, the predominant protocol used by VoIP providers allow for conveying th subject of the call, just like email does. But alas, there is no way to convey that to a telephone/ATA end point. And I could continue for some length. None of the FCC regulations force VoIP providers not to offer any of these services/features. It may be convenient or fashionable to rally the base by faulting the incumbents or FCC, but the reality is that VoIP industry could offer many new, exciting features and it is solely our fault that we haven’t even made an attempt to get market reaction on these services and features.
