IMO, the LOC are going to fight back big time...
They won't have to fight back very hard; I'm already paying flat-rate $20/month (Canadian) for all-you-can-eat long distance. International isn't covered, but it will be soon enough.
The problem with (cheap) IP telephony can be experienced by anyone with a RealAudio player. What's the first thing RA does when it hooks up to a site? It buffers. That's acceptable for broadcast, but how the heck is that supposed to work for live, two-way communications? This isn't a slam of RA, it's just a fact of life with IP. The reason IP is cheap is because there are no bandwidth/latency/etc guarantees; data gets there, well, when it gets there. There's a reason Cisco is pushing MPLS (sort of an ATM QoS equivalent) into IP. Without it, you can't get there from here unless you're willing to live with very ineffecient usage of bandwidth.
Now, you *can* dedicate bandwidth so phone calls achieve an acceptable quality level, but guess what? That costs money, and suddenly it isn't so cheap compared to traditional telephony. The problem can't be solved at the gateway level, it has to be solved at the network level. |
