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Technology Stocks : LAST MILE TECHNOLOGIES - Let's Discuss Them Here -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Frank A. Coluccio who wrote (10624)	3/1/2001 11:05:42 PM
From: Jeff Pulver	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 12823

Frank, I agree with your points. I believe my forecasts back in 1997 have been on target and I feel very comfortable with the future. I think one of the issues is that some people might be missing is that VoIP technologies HAVE been adopted by a majority of worldwide carriers. The time has past for somebody to tout a service as a "VoIP Service". QoS these days stand for Quantity of Service not Quality of service since the industry discovered it was possible to deploy IP over ATM and over provision the bandwidth. As far as I'm concerned, companies should be offering products with features and functions that customers are looking for and stay away from marketing the product/service based on the underlying technology. While SIP will be the ultimate liberator of telecom, most consumers don't know and shouldn't care about MGCP, H.323 or SIP. (Although soon they will care about SIP). What matters is being able to deliver on the vision of doing things never before possible without IP but at the same time foucsing on the needs of the customer and delivering to the customer the things they are looking for. In the softswitch space you have to assume that there will be consolidation since the marketplace just can't support the 180+ companies playing in the same space selling to the same customers. And some startups are running out of $$ since they can't go IPO and they are having trouble getting funding at valuations anything close to where they were a year ago and in some cases egos are getting in the way. One area which I'm very hot on is "End to End IP". Below is a story I pasted from the current issue of The Pulver Report ( pulver.com ). End-to-End IP: The Disruptive Future for IP Communications End-to-End IP was one of the hot topics discussed at our recent annual IP Communications Industry Summit earlier this month in Sophia Antipolis. This is also the subject of our general session at Spring 2001 VON. David Waks's report "End-To-End IP: How will the ILECs Survice?" is a recommended read at: ( pulver.com ). When looking at the evolution of "End-to-End IP" I see an opportunity for end users to finally become liberated from the power of the telcos and their usage-charge-based telephony model by the power of IP innovation and the ubiquity of the Net. End user call control can become a reality and the "personal central office" becomes one of the ultimate realities. End-to-End IP requires only directory resources for the edge devices to find each other analogous to the DNS system. Communication takes place between edge devices without switching bottlenecks (i.e. busy signals) associated with traditional telecom. One issue we as an Industry needs to overcome fast are NAT and Firewall problems. While IP Communications may not require a centralized infrastructure, it is necessary to eventually be able to touch the end points involved in the communication path. This "new" VoIP architecture actually just parallels the time tested architecture of the larger Internet. The good news is the technologies and standards under development today will allow real-time point-to-point IP communication to take place under the decentralized, redundant structure of the Internet, with no centralized routing hierarchy. I've heard some people ready to argue that the adoption of VoIP on such a massive scale needed to make end-to-end IP a reality is still eons away. The total world voice traffic over IP today is still less than two percent. There is less and less incentive for worldwide VoIP takeup, because the costs of long distance and international voice traffic over the PSTN have been dramatically reduced and will continue to be reduced. So, How will "End-to-End" IP Communications Happen? It will happen, because it's being driven by forces bigger than just the vested interests of the telcos. It's being driven by sociological and economic forces which have been seen before in the evolution of technology, the forces of a disruptive new technology. And historical experience has shown that such forces are ultimately irresistible. It is just a matter of time for when it will happen, rather than if. I'm also a strong believer that the killer app for Broadband is Telephony. (see the Pulver Report for this story). Look for End to End IP to be one of the major drivers in Telecom in 2001. Another trend to look for is peer-to-peer telephony project which I'm involved in which is launching in a couple of weeks. Details are at ( pulver.com ) Jeff