George,
Re: Barrons
Ordinarily I read these articles with a large grain of salt. And for good reasons.
I scanned the article on the web site when you first posted the question. I saw a few stark errors which I initially attributed to typos (that's how bad they were), and resigned myself to taking a closer look at it later on.
Yesterday SteveG posted the same article <some snippets on the VoIP thread> which I re-read, and then read the entire article today. I came to realize that the errors I first saw were not typos at all. Instead, they were actually evidence of blatant ignorance surrounding some key facts. Others were wrong assumptions based on the errors originally committed.
Sure, there was some great theorizing on matters which they were in fact highly conversant in, the industry as it has evolved over the past 110 years, where they _thought_ it was heading, and why.
But as far as VoIP went, I give them a " 3 " on the L.O.S. scale:
Three Guys Lost in Space, without a tie line or a ring down.
The way I determined that the errors weren't typos was by analyzing the underlying discussion surrounding some of the figures they were throwing around. With impunity, I might add. Very casual, and very sloppy. The conclusions they were reaching were based on some of the misinformation they were generating in the previous breath.
Voilla: Noise!
These folks (and I'm sure, many on their staff) are no doubt experts in benchmarking _traditional_ carrier metrics, both in financial performance and technical parameters. And that's all well and good. Except for one screaming fly in the ointment: They don't know how to benchmark, or even begin to estimate a baseline for, the future of Internet Telephony. And that, I would have to assume, scares the living hell out of them on a number of levels.
If they can't, who will? This must be playing on them constantly for the basic fear that someone else actually will, which is a silly premise at this stage. How could they, or anyone else, demonstrate a prescience in the future of a paradigm which is born of chaos, heading toward more chaos, and when the founders of this thing can't even tell us where it is going, or where its ultimate potentials lie?
I wont even get into what the mistakes were that put me over the top on this one. Evan might accuse me of throwing out teasers, if I did. <s>
I do believe, however, that there are some incipient albeit relatively benign threats to VoIP from other technologies, but I am not in agreement with the article's principals' reasons for same. And the techs I'm referring to have been around for a while, they are getting better, and will coexist nicely with VoIP, in any event. So, not to worry for the long haul. However long happens to be these days.
Best Regards, Frank Coluccio |
