Alec Saunders SquawkBox

Rich Tehrani has a great post over on his blog about his conversation with Carly Fiorina and her upcoming keynote at ITExpo.  Sounds like it’s going to be a great speech!  One of the items they discussed was the separation between carrier and enterprise, quoted below:

In her words, telecom/datacom and service provider/enterprise are not separate realms. Instead of having to organize and respond along vertical chains of command we need horizontal collaboration across boundaries and companies.

The fundamental driver behind these statements is the fact that we don’t lead neatly segmented lives. Here’s a thought experiment – how many of the contact points shown in the chart below do you have?  How many would you like to have? How many will you have in five years?

If you’re like me, you probably have multiple email addresses, IM identities, a blackberry and so on.  You’re hyper-connected!

The biggest problem with the chart, of course, is that we no longer have a separate business identity and a separate personal personal identity anymore.  Those identities have become blurred together.  My kids phone me at work, and my business partner phones me at home.  Communications applications need to help me manage that blurry identity, and deal with the reality of living my life, as opposed to the neatly compartmentalized life implied by traditional service provider models.   The alternative — the chaos of multiple phone numbers, multiple email addresses, multiple IM identities and so on — is simply unacceptable.

According to Jeff Pulver, that’s me.  Jeff spent part of the weekend producing a great roundup of VON blogs.  Well worth reading through if you want to get a flavor of what happened at the show.

The Times has reported that BT is slashing the cost of BT communicator calls.  The new pricing and marketing programs are very aggressive (1/2p per minute to up to 27 other countries), and demonstrate the seriousness with which the incumbents view Skype, and the margin that still remains in a PSTN long distance call.  There is still more margin, though.  If BT were North American, that price could still drop another 10%.

At this point, does the average consumer care?  Probably not.  I chatted with my dad a couple of days ago, and encouraged him to use Skype.  I told him it was free, to which he responded "My calls are already virtually free".  He uses one of the many 1010 dial-around services.

BT really is fighting the wrong war. As the Times article points out, DSG International (owner of the UK Dixon’s chain), and PlusNet (a UK ISP) are both diving into the Internet calling market too.  When anyone can jump into the market, your tactics have to change.  The BT marketing team is trying to price compete, when they need to compete on brand and market share. 

What if:

• BT built a Price Club / Costco model.  For an annual fee, calls are free. SunRocket is doing that very successfully right now here in North America.  Most people burn through 1100 minutes per month of calling time.  At 0.5p per minute, BT could offer unlimited calling to anywhere for 5 pounds per month, and still make money. 
• BT simply declared that all calls between BT subscribers, whether on a land line or the PC, were included in the monthly bill. 

One of the neatest companies at VON was a tiny non-profit in the Asterisk booth called Inveneo. Inveneo is bringing modern communications technology to the third world.  For environments where electricity isn’t available, they’ve designed a low-powered computer system (10 watt, with a 10 watt display), powered from a battery source, which is in turn charged by either a bicycle powered generator, or a solar panel.  One hour of cycling is enough to charge the battery for four hours of use.  It can be used for all kinds of purposes, including communications using VoIP, and, of course, Asterisk.

I chatted with Kristin Peterson, one of the co-founders.  It was inspirational.  They’ve packaged these systems as products to sell to NGO’s for deployment in Africa and other impoverished parts of the world.  Right now, one of their deployments is in the southern USA, where they’re helping to establish communication again in the wake of Hurricane Katrina.

Rich Tehrani has a more information on Inveneo on his blog. 

I’ve been digging through the pile of cards I returned from VON with, and discovered, on Tom Howe’s card, this site: http://www.thomashowe.com. Another VoIP blogger!  Some of you may know Tom as the founder of Tangerine Inc.  Most recently, he’s been CTO of Versatel Networks.