Gary, what is your point? Are you saying Carriers are going to offer free long-distance as long as the customers are forced to listen to some canned advertising before making their Long Distance phone calls?
Do you really think the network capacity owners are going to make money this way?
Are you suggesting that all the Carriers, PTT's, IXC's are going to be forced to make their money through advertising revenue on their web sites in the long-term?
This is a very brash, unsubstantiated musing that no serious telecom analyst currently would agree with. No one knows the future but based on your line of thinking, one would have to conclude that companies like General Motors would give away their cars to consumers in order to make their money by servicing the vehicle and selling add-ons! Preposterous you say? That't the logical extension of what you are really saying here.
Yes, ISP's and ASP's will continue to experiment with loss-leader free access, bundling, and other forms of monetizing their customer base but to extrapolate that and say that the owners of the bandwidth ultimately must follow suit is neither a logical necessity or inevitabilty.
In fact, I would argue that the trend is for more specialization where in the long term, vertically integrated PTT's and Carriers will concentrate on what they do best -- build and manage network -- and then resell network capacity to ISP's and ASP's that are mushrooming each day to identify niche service/application markets.
And if the backbone Carriers/PTT's realize that they cannot hope to compete in the downstream (service, application) side of the business with all the creative little ISP's and ASP's, the only way they are going to stay alive is to CHARGE for bandwidth.
Economics 101 Gary........... |
