The Wall Street Journal has a page one story about the changing face of the telephone industry with some very insightful viewpoints from the two authors.
The whole idea of VoIP disrupting the baby bells business by others such as the traditional long distance players (i.e. Sprint, MCI, AT&T), the Cable Companies (Time Warner, Cox, Comcast, Cablevision) and the upstarts (Packet 8, Vonage) is really rather funny.
Most, if not all of the RBOC had the opportunity to go VoIP long before anyone else. All of the softswitch, media gateway and application server folks made thousands of sales calls on the RBOCs and the RBOC’s all had people working on VoIP. The problem was investment dollars and recovering their investments in legacy circuit switched systems.
When the newcomers, or wise LD companies looked at the future, they all knew VoIP was the future and moved in that direction. Only QWEST was aggressive in VoIP, but their own internal issues slowed down what should have been an easy entry to what was a virgin marketplace. Now Verizon and SBC both are coming into the market way late, and of course in addition to battling the upstarts and the entrenched VoIP players, on the enterprise side they have to contend with Level3 and Covad, amongst a long line of hypbrid companies, that already understand the mixing of the world of Voice and Data, just like, AT&T does.
This story in the WSJ is a great read and worth looking at.
of course the RBOC’s are NOT going to cannibalize their own customer base to invest in anything that takes away from their EXTORTION MONOPOLY of land line dominance…………they will stick their heads IN THE SAND until the heavy weight COMCAST and COX come out of the closet with their BUNDLED VOIP and then all of a sudden the RBOC’s will almost act like they INVENTED VOIP………..
ATT will make everyone MOVE quicker with those olympic ads…………numbers ON ATT VOIP SO FAR????????????
skibare