VoIP's Big Week.

Voxilla.com has a great summary of activity in the VoIP industry, including announced plans from Qwest, AT&T and SBC to roll-out consumer VoIP products in conjunction with their broadband services (DSL), as well as details from the FCC Hearing on VoIP. I've become an active user of VoIP telephony services -- it's unbelievable how quickly this is happening, and how the standards convergence combined with a critical mass of broadband users is transforming this industry overnight.

More proof positive that market forces will almost always take away any high margins your business is enjoying. If there is a big enough discrepancy between your products cost (including start up costs) and the return you are enjoying than you will eventually succumb to profit erosion as competitors flood the marketplace. This is the lesson that VoIP taught the telcos and now the telcos are fighting back and teaching it to the VoIP companies. Given that there is a huge amount of uncertainty in how this market place is going to shake out I find it surprising (though I shouldn't) that it has become the hot new fad on Wall Street lately.

While I suck at macro-economic predictions I think it's safe to say that not all of these companies will survive and prosper, especially now that the traditional telcos are putting their might behind the technology. Sure everyone might eventually move from traditional phone to VoIP but there will be a handful of dominant companies. Moreover, part of the traditional success of telcos stemmed from their government protected monopoly and their cooperative price fixing model. This is a whole new ball game this time around and the winners won't be visible for awhile.

via [Jeremy Allaire's Radio]

1:39:45 PM  #  

Now it seems like my CSS layouts are getting screwed up.  What is going on with Radio?

1:38:42 PM  #  

Radio seems to get hung up on postings occasionally. Weird. My last four posts over the last 2 days have not been updated to the server yet.

1:30:19 PM  #