Free Has A Price

I love all the coverage that we give to “free” calling. Aswath brings up the kind of clarity to the point of “free” that really needs to be expounded upon.

I am a believer that costs of calls have dropped to zero. Just look at Skype, Gizmo and other services like that which leverage infrastructure that allows people to have telephone like conversations.

I am also a believer that the applications are what we will pay for, and that in a Voice 2.0 world those applications will be where value will be extracted and money made.

To go one step farther, I contend that the old school carriers are in the best position to make money off of the applications, not the startups or upstarts. Why? Because the already own the customer relationship with people who have telephones and really don’t care (or know) if the service is PSTN or VoIP or Skype. If you look at the stats more who use voice mail at home likely get it from the phone company, not a third party who may offer more bells and whistles or even a cheaper service. Very few people use a third party caller ID type of service. They pay the phone company. It’s when VoIP comes into play that other applications become available and that’s where the money in the future will be found.

Candidly, someone building a SIP applications farm that works with PSTN would be a great idea…I’m somewhat surprised that no one has that ready to rock, other than PhoneGnome. Think of it this way. Plant your applications, let the people who want it to be able to sow it into their phone system. All it would require is a bridge into the SS7 network and some back office billing methodology.

As these new apps come along the telco gets more money, and in turn can lower the cost per minute of calls. To me, its a no-brainer.