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Google’s Entirely Frank Defense of Google Voice

It’s no secret Ma Bell isn’t happy with “upstarts” like Google Voice elbowing into their turf. The VoIP FUD machine, fueled by the telecom industry’s status quo, has been running on full blast for the last ten years, even to the extent that, until recently anyway, I was willing to concede that Ma Bell had won.

Now that AT&T has begun to ring the FCC about it’s dissatisfaction with certain players whose VoIP apps have gained momentum–chief among them Google Voice–the overwhelming debate between players in the Internet and telecom fields is now an out-front, obvious affair. This is due, I suppose, to Google’s use of very frank, conversational techniques–like blogging–in defending its policy positions and in describing its products or advances.

Ultimately, Google is arguing that AT&T would like the FCC to regulate that all VoIP apps that originate or terminate calls on the PSTN–Skype and Google Voice, both mentioned in Google’s rebuttle–be treated like phone lines, and idea that Google and I both agree is silly.

I vote for getting rid of the term “phone line” altogether. Where the app can’t be separated from the transport (as in a phone line), leave the existing regulations (and taxes) in place. But as that paradigm dies, so should the regulations intended to take advantage of its popularity.

eWeek picks up on Apple’s DIY plans for Voice features

In an article posted today at eWeek, AT&T is excused from its traditional role as scapegoat in the Google Voice rejection fiasco. And my previously posted sentiments about Apple building something that competes with Google Voice have finally been echoed on a mainstream outlet.

Well doy, Apple realizes that consumer-empowering voice technology is a competitive advantage. We VoIP folks have been preaching that gospel for the last ten years. Comrade Ken Camp wrote with visionary accuracy about the merits of VoIP in his book IP Telephony Demystified, one of the really early books on the subject. I agreed with him when I wrote Switching to VoIP that VoIP is a leveler of the playing field, a true equalizer and a legitimately revolutionary technology item.

I’ve also viewed carriers like AT&T, at least for the last four or five years, as access providers, not “phone line providers” offering dialtone. Apple, it seems, has arrived at the same conclusion.

Three points on the Apple/Google/FCC Fiasco

First, it’s not the FCC’s domain but the Federal Trade Commission’s domain whether or not a business practice, like Apple’s (admittedly inconsistent) enforcement of it’s own developer agreements, is an unfair trade practice. And it may well be unfair; that doesn’t make it within the jurisdiction of the FCC, whose stock and trade isn’t social progress or anti-collusion. Clearly, those are business matters whose definition of justice has little or nothing to do with voice as an application. We have to be careful not to push the social progress agenda too hard–especially to the extend that we’re routinely punishing those who are earning a great profit, vis-a-vis Apple and the iPhone.

Second, let’s ask the real question: Since we know the decision to allow Google Voice is ultimately up to Apple, and not AT&T, what could Apple’s motivation for this rejection possibly be? Are we ignoring the simple answer? Enhancements to the iChat ecosystems, perhaps? The most obvious answer may not satisfy the conspiracy theorists. But something as easy as Apple is getting ready to release their own Voice-killer makes the most since to me, to heck with AT&T’s bandwidth.

Finally, I’ve almost concluded that AT&T’s days as the exclusive distributor of iPhones in North America are numbered. Apple would have to score a pretty low IQ to permanently marry their network support to a single carrier, with the rise of new wide-area wireless networking standards and mass WiFi addiction marching on with no favoritism towards Bell. This would seem to indicate, at least out here in the “sensible” midwest, that Apple is not beholden to AT&T, a company short on both sexy intellectual property and an applications-oriented revenue model, for a short-term political favor that screws its relationship with Google, a company who is enriched of both.

The answer to this mystery, I believe, is in Cupertino.

Heartburn Chuckle: The telecom industry can blame itself

As pal Om Malik writes this weekend about the layoff woes at Alcatel-Lucent and the delisting danger at Nortel, many of us in the industry are experience what I call the “Heartburn Chuckle”. Or, as I try to put an ironic spin on Jeff Pulver’s famous Purple Minutes expression by calling negative achievements in the telecom industry as “Brown Minutes”, I can’t help but laugh at how empty the promise of unified communications has turned out to be.

This is Brown Minutes and the Heartburn Chuckle all wrapped together. But I can tell you why this telecom crash is occuring. Remember, once an industry is scaled to its max, like the telecom industry, the only way to succeed is to generate profit through new innovations. Merely recycling established ideas with different pricing and bundles may be good for short-term cash grabs but has little to do with the sustainability of long-term profit. Just ask Yahoo. They’re dying because of that axiom right now.

The Manufacturers

Companies like Cisco and Nortel have done too little to move the VoIP revolution beyond the customer’s demarc, while tradeshow talks about SIP trunking and a spirit of cooperation in using the Internet to replace the PSTN have all been hollow talk designed to please the audience of the day. True, end-to-end VoIP still isn’t reality unless you’re willing to sit in front of your PC and run Skype. To say Skype carried out the VoIP vision more successfully than Cisco and Nortel ought to be greatly humbing to those companies, but it’s really true. Skype got it. Cisco, Nortel, and Avaya didn’t.

The big manufacturers continue to be the only powers with enough leverage to move the carrier giants away from circuit-switched technology, yet the manufacturer’s own uncertainties about recooping licensing fees and retaining customer-base (through lock-in rather than innovation) have scared them away from issuing the carriers a real challenge: build an all-IP global voice network or we will.

The Carriers

The carriers are firms like AT&T, Windstream, Verizon, BT, and so on. Their obsession with the billing unit (the almighty minute) has made them helpless to see the possibilities of a software-rich, application-based global ecosystem. Consequently, the most successful apps to arrive on the carriers’ networks, the ones most embraced by the public, overwhelmingly have one purpose: to steal billable minutes from the carriers. The innovation disappeared and the scrappy new players in the market, the ones with the power to transform the public’s thinking about telecom, instead got stuck doing the same old thing the big telecoms do to put bread on the table: bill minutes.

The Government

In the United States, deregulation under President Clinton in the Telecom Act of 1996 went in all the wrong directions and didn’t do enough to create entrepreneurial freedom in telecom. It failed to recognize that the Internet was going to eclipse the PSTN in terms of consumer participation, and as a result, it positioned the carriers to remain in their highly subsidized comfort zone.

Further mistakes were made when the FCC became distracted by lobbying for Network Neutrality legislation. As with many things, the passage of time revealed that Netnoot was a solution in search of a problem, more often than not. Apparently nobody at the FCC realized that the free market would provide for the needs of consumers who didn’t want to participate in a 93-octane Internet. So the FCC spent a lot of time looking at issues that were overstated and geared to bolster the chances of a few admittedly excellent Silicon Valley content startups who didn’t want to get choked out by the carriers.

Shame on us for not recognizing that the carriers are too inept to succeed in the content business anyway. And shame on the FCC for wasting all that energy when they should’ve been looking at ways to encourage greater adoption of end-to-end IP technology.

The Conclusion

So, when you have three willing participants in a massacre, you get a massacre. The three power players in our industry–boxmakers, regulators, and networkers–are playing the same tune. Protect revenue by doing nothing. The fruits of that labor are now obvious. Like the automotive industry, which has a frighteningly similar situation on its hands, the answer now is the same as ten years ago: innovation. Put on those thinking caps, MIT grads and garage tinkerers. We’ve got an even bigger hole to think our way out of now.

No landlines by end of Obama’s first term? Don’t hold your breath

Like many of us, including contemporary Tom Evslin, the lust for fast fiber and quick wireless technologies has tech pundits dreaming of a day when copper lines won’t dominate the last mile of access. Tom boldly proclaims, in the first paragraph of his post, “By the end of President Obama’s first term, there won’t be any more landlines left in the country.”

That’s quite a prediction considering how entrenched the US is in copper infrastructure, and how pokey the telcos have been about delivering fiber to the last mile. That said, I can easily counterpredict that there will be plenty of landlines left in the country by the end of Obama’s term, and if he goes eight years, there will still be plenty of good old copper dial tone.

There are several more reasons why. First, reliable and abundant FAX-over-IP is still a dream that hasn’t been standardized to the point where consumers have a consistent manner in which to use it. So those pesky FAX lines will be with us for some time. Second, digital last mile services like PRI are still too expensive for the majority of subscribers, even medium-sized business with 6 – 8 phone lines, in many cases. Third, lots of monitoring equipment, like that used by fire and security systems, still requires the use of copper dial-tone because its modems are too sensitive to the use of jittery VoIP. Even managed network providers like Qwest require the use of a POTS line to monitor frame relay and MPLS equipment, and no, they don’t support monitoring this equipment digitally.

Notwithstanding an overhaul to the universal service fund (USF), the shrink in landline abundance is likely to cause a few headaches for the telcos still playing the copper game four years from now, but it’s pie in the sky to think that those lines are going to be gone.

Signal to Noise

Teddy Wallingford, Rock and Roll CEO

Google’s Entirely Frank Defense of Google Voice

eWeek picks up on Apple’s DIY plans for Voice features

Three points on the Apple/Google/FCC Fiasco

Heartburn Chuckle: The telecom industry can blame itself

No landlines by end of Obama’s first term? Don’t hold your breath

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