I didn’t set out to predict telecom’s future in 2004. I just refused to write about it like everyone else was writing about it. Most of the trade press treated VoIP like a hobbyist curiosity, a thing for people who liked soldering irons and free long distance. I treated it like a war that hadn’t been named yet. Twenty two years later, the receipts are in.
At the end of 2003 I decided to write a blog about VoIP. Back then it was more of a novelty being written about by a few people. Jeff Pulver. David Beckemeyer. Om Malik. Tom Keating. Rich Tehrani to name a few. Alec Saunders with his Saunders Log came along shortly after me. So did Ken Camp, Dan York, James Enck and Martin Geddes (in London) and a handful of others. All became friends. Not just online, but in person.
When I started VoIPWatch, I did it with three goals.
1. Get Quoted by the Media
2. Speak at Conferences
3. Make new friends
All three came true. The bi-product was it led to the establishment of Comunicano as the dominant agency in VoIP for the next 20 years and the establishment one year later when Nokia came calling and asked me to redefine how products got reviewed. That became “The Nokia Blogger Relations Program,” the first ever corporate backed (and successful) influencer relations program. That, and so much more grew out of VoIPWatch (now andybramson.com)
Back then, Ken Rutkowski and I were pioneering streaming media with “The World Tech Roundup” and our 300,000 daily listeners, so I took my prognostication style of bringing clarity to the news, or as Ken used to say, “others break the news. We fix it” approach to the blog. That approach is the same thing I’m doing these days but with a focus on AI, SportsTech and markets which are being redefined and rewritten, not just a hobby or novelty.
This morning I decided, with the help of ChatGPT to look back at that first year, a pivotal year, in my career and actually my life, as it was blogging that led me to meet my future wife, not at the Stanford University hosted BloggerCon, but wandering through the lobby of the W in San Francisco with wine bottles in hand, for a dinner that night with friends and Om Malik, who asked me to teach him about wine and Indian food.
So with all that as a backdrop, here are the five calls I made that year, and how they held up.
The Pulver Order wasn’t a memo. It was a weapon.
When the FCC handed down the Pulver Order, I didn’t file it under regulatory housekeeping. I called it a green light for a telecom renaissance, a moment where VoIP stopped being a tool and became a weapon for industry titans. Cisco, Google and Microsoft read it the same way. Cisco’s shopping spree alone, WebEx, BroadSoft, Dynamicsoft, Jasper Technologies, was a chess match played in the open. I said the order was the dawn of a revolution. It was.
Main Street was next, not the geeks.
While the industry argued about codecs, I watched the shelf space. My client back then, AT&T, put CallVantage on Amazon.com and I called it exactly what it was: a channel marketing strategy, not a one-off announcement. By December, Walmart had dipped a toe in VoIP too. Consumer telecom stopped being a specialist’s purchase and became a retail product. That shift didn’t reverse. It accelerated.
Cable was about to declare war on the phone company, and win.
Probe Research came out bullish on cable operators partnering with AT&T to push VoIP adoption. Sprint chased the exact playbook AT&T had already run, cutting its own cable deal with Mediacom to get in front of that customer base before someone else did. Motorola was already shipping a combined cable modem and VoIP box out of Taiwan. I called the real fight correctly too: whether cable’s PacketCable standard or open SIP would win the architecture war. SIP won it. Cable kept the customers. Both predictions landed.
One device would replace the pile on your desk. I just had the timeline wrong.
I begged, in print, for someone to build a single WiFi, VoIP and cable modem router so I could throw out four boxes and keep one. I was skeptical of early VoWiFi handsets because the audio quality lagged a cordless phone and the authentication problem hadn’t been solved. I said the same thing about VoIP on a PocketPC: not ready, too expensive, mic too cheap, chip too slow. All of that was true in 2004. The convergence happened exactly as I called it. It just arrived in your pocket as a smartphone instead of a router on your desk. Direction right. Vehicle wrong. I’ll take that trade every time.
The money was coming, and it was going to get crowded fast.
Vonage raised $105 million and I said it plainly: that money turns into marketing, advertising and developer partnerships, not just server racks. In the same stretch I was already cataloguing the next wave, SiPZoo, a Russian carrier called TelPhin, Broadvox building out switching centers for the SOHO market. By November, a European VoIP blog had launched and I welcomed it because it proved the category had stopped being an American story. The funding wave came. The field got crowded. The category went global. All three, on schedule.
The through line
None of this was hedged. I wasn’t writing “VoIP could disrupt telecom.” I was writing that it was disrupting telecom, in real time, while most of the industry was still debating whether the technology was a fad. Twenty two years later the “press 1” phone tree world I described back then is finally dead, killed by the exact AI-native platforms that grew out of the infrastructure I was writing about in 2004.
Now I’m tackling sports tech, AI and the changes that are coming that others miss. Not the story. Covering that is easier now than when I broke into Journalism as a teenager. My style has always been looking ahead, seeing around the corners and paying attention to what’s on the other side of the mountain.
That’s why I’m covering what makes changes. Or as lacrosse superstar John Grant used to say in our “Boys of Summer” era with the Philadelphia Wings. “There’s gonna be changes. Lots and lots of changes.” That’s what I’m covering. That’s what I’m watching. And that’s what you’re seeing, here. Everyday. Just like in 2004.
In 2004, I was writing about the system. Everyone else was still arguing about the moment.
Systems win. Moments expire.
Andy Abramson runs Comunicano, a strategic communications firm that has guided 64 startup exits generating more than $9.5 billion in client value, and has covered telecom, VoIP and sports business since founding VoIPWatch in 2004.
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