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Technology Stocks : The *NEW* Frank Coluccio Technology Forum -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Lhn5 who wrote (17528)	10/29/2006 3:39:50 PM
From: axial	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 46821

"Well, what if during the conversation you can press a button and record the call...not just the rest of the call, but the entire call from it's beginning. Would that ability be worth a few bucks a month, especially if packaged with some other cool stuff?" Yup. Absolutely. The absence of that potential feature has an explanation in the evolution of mobile technology, but need not persist. Jim

To: Lhn5 who wrote (17528)	10/29/2006 7:04:24 PM
From: Frank A. Coluccio	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 46821

Hi Lhn5. re: "If these guys and their partners can sell the hardware and software and handsets.....someone, somehow, somewhere, will provide the pipes." Have you noticed recently that almost every (pseudo-academic sounding) IT representative and spokesperson these days starts their sentence off with "So," and how, suddenly, everyone is spawning "ecosystems?" To your point concerning the provisioning of pipes in support of VoIP services, I'd have to ask, what is the context? Is it public voice networking, a la PSTN, or enterprise? Is it purely a residential adjunct for personal purposes? In any venue you select the costs of provisioning raw transit today are relatively low to aproaching non-existent, which accounts in large part for why competition in the sector is so fierce. I'm not even sure that competition is the correct word to use in those situations where VoIP is given away for 'free,' as is the emerging case that is being fostered by a growing number of 3- and 4- play service bundles around the world right now. Yesterday Eric L. wrote about T-Mobile's alleged "free" VoIP from the residence. Yes, there's a catch there, one must pay $20 per month giving them license to use both residential and commercial hot spots, which the carrier makes appear as only a concomitant requirement, but it at the same time removes its ability to truly consider the service 'free.' But that aside, the point is one could actually speak non-stop using the service, pushing per-minute pro-rated chages down to the point where they may as well be totally free. In Europe, service provider Iliad has a service it actually calls "Free." That is, as one would call Vonage, "Vonage," Iliad calls its service, "Free." Free's approach is slightly different from that of T-Mobile's, which uses a residential router and a WiFi phone. Iliad's claim is that its "freebox" is a modified set top box that doubles as a mini-GSM base station, and currently there are some 300,000 customers using free mobile services today as the fourth part of its quadruple play. I'm giving you this off the top of my head, so my recall must be verified. But essentially, this is what I've gathered. One point that sits with me is that users acknowledge that its quality is not in any way superior, but the bottom line to the majority of them is that free trumps QoS. Concerning the apparent abundance of terminal and software supply that you mentioned, the industry is literally bursting at its seams with thousands of suppliers of every type. About a month ago I was introduced to a company in the Boston area whose package I would have been absolutely taken by only three or four years ago. But, in my final assessment to the party doing the introduction (a VC friend), I advised him that he should take a long, comparative look at another list of outfits I presented to him before committing himself in any significant way. "... if I can put the first 4 together, yeah, I can figure out the last 3. I'm good. Well, what if during the conversation you can press a button and record the call...not just the rest of the call, but the entire call from it's beginning. Would that ability be worth a few bucks a month, especially if packaged with some other cool stuff?" Oh, I think it would be worth the price of admission, even if only for the ability to prove without a doubt that the milk requested was not 1% fat but fat free! Now here's a question I have for you. Considering the nature of the services you've mentioned, first, are they services or applications, and secondly, would you prefer that they be sourced and supported by the telco in its IP Centrex or by you, yourself, in the way of applications that sit on your your own appliance(s)? Which of these would you prefer, and why? FAC