<Not to mention the nemesis of the entire telecom bubble machine. Lack of demand... <g>
Re: Long Distance Carriers - I tried something new yesterday. Bought one of those insanely cheap phone cards. Yammered forever at 2.5 cents per minute. Worked great. Goodbye AT&T, goodbye Sprint, goodbye Worldcom/MCI. >
Ray, what you just showed is that there is plenty of demand, but not at the prices which the old-timer telecom monopolists were accustomed to.
That's why CDMA is so important - GSM can't provide the huge volume at low prices which is the key to success. GSM makers have had great success in stretching the performance of GSM networks and handsets, but the inherent drawbacks mean they'll be taken over by CDMA. But I am surprised how long it has taken. 3 years have been added to how I thought things would go back in the early 1990s. But there hasn't been variation in the technological trend, just the timing [which in money matters is the difference between life and death - goodbye Globalstar].
An important facet of telecom networks and cyberspace will be to avoid epileptic fits when demand exceeds supply and people keep hitting SEND to get through, shutting down the system with 'denial of service' overloads. Netileptic fits will not be popular. The way to avoid netilepsy is to price minutes/megabytes according to instantaneous demand.
People are not keen on hiring epileptic airline pilots and neither will they be keen on hiring netipleptic cyberspace operators.
Mqurice
PS: It still, 6 years after starting to interact in cyberspace, causes me a feeling of 'surreal presence' when I realize somebody else is RIGHT NOW somewhere else in cyberspace, clicking on keys and looking at pixels I'm writing and reacting. I'm not sure that surreal presence is the right description, but I suppose readers will know what I mean from their own experience.
A similar feeling is when talking on a cellphone, to find somebody, and suddenly they come into view and you walk up to them talking on the phone to them and the sense of reality change is fascinating. They transit from disembodied abstract though immediate, to 3D real. |
