Internet Telephony – Especially the Internet Part

I wrote about Internet Telephony a few weeks ago and I’m not sure I made my points well.  Of course IP Telephony has taken off in the last decade.  One nice person sent me a link to the best 10 services who can provide me with IP telephony service.  I’m still working on how to articulate what my point really is… but it’s something like this:  yes, IP Telephony in the model of the PSTN has taken off just fine in the last 10 years.  But IP Telephony in the model of the Internet has not really advanced much at all in that time.

Jonathan Rosenburg of Cisco wrote a great blog last week entitled The Future of Federation.  He’s talking about the same thing – will the future hold open systems or will it hold systems essentially beholden to the PSTN and the vested interests in that universe?  Think about it – most of what’s available is PSTN gateway stuff.  PSTN hop-on and hop-off gateways.  Ways to make an IP call and interface to the PSTN.  As my friend Ed Okerson commented to me recently “what, you still have times you are not connected?  Go fix that!”  Certainly for many of us there’s no reason at all to hop off the Internet.  Everyone we know is nearly always on.  A dozen years ago Ed and I wrote the Linux Telephony API because we were paying through the nose to talk to each other (he’s in Dallas, I’m in San Francisco).  At Quicknet we envisioned a ‘MicroTelco’ that could enable anyone with Internet access to become a tiny little telco and participate in a global voice system.  Quicknet never realized it’s dream (I’ll write more on that another day).  But when cell phone plans took in-network minutes to no cost the itch for pure IP telephony solutions didn’t itch so much.The cell system made it possible for a few years to not think about the cost of your plan any more if the majority of folks you called were on the same carrier.  But now there’s a bit more diversity in carriers.  Some have better coverage near your home, some offer a plan that suites your device better than others.  And data is increasingly a part of that.  Your friends may no longer be on the same network, but many, if not all, have near ubiquitous Internet access.

Data access is common but not everywhere. If it was everywhere, wireless, we could have real IP telephony.  We started to sense the promise of that with Google Talk on iPhone.  But I’ve writren about that before.  It’s not going to happen soon. And that’s the rub.  Data access is still provided by the same entities that provide the PSTN.  Real Internet Telephony scares them since it’s not a per-minute based world.  But the future is rarely held in check by the powerful titans of an industry.  We only have to look at the past to see the patterns.  Dominance.  Slow decline.  While slowly innovation and a change in customer needs and business climate makes it possible for a new market force to disrupt the old juggernaut.  I highly recommend this book:

I’m hoping we are seeing the start of this now.  It all hinges on easier data access.  If that happens, we might see some of what we envisioned at Quicknet all those years ago.  Jonathan Rosenburg calls it the future of federation.  I call it the next innovative, evolutionary step in voice communications.  I hope I’m right.  Only time will tell.