Waiting for Voice 2.0
Jim Van Meggelen is frustrated with silo-thinking. In his Saturday posting Will Any Visionary Carriers Please Step Forward, he bemoans the lack of integration between PBX’s and carriers, and, by implication, between the carriers themselves.
We’re waiting for Godot Voice 2.0, baby!
Seemingly granting that the carriers can actually see the future, Andy Abramson comments that they are buying what’s safe. Safe, yes, but more importantly, protectable inside the carrier’s walled garden. Open networks, like those championed by AOL’s Ragui Kamel, and open technology solutions like David Beckemeyer’s PhoneGnome, are slowly eroding that protection.
Perhaps, as Jim suggests, it will take a government or a large corporation to insist that this integration happens, or perhaps it will be the work of visionaries like Ragui Kamel and David Beckemeyer. Ultimately, however, the walls will come down.
December 15th, 2006 at 10:22 am
[...] Alec Saunders revisits the state of Voice 2.0 in a response to a post by Jim Van Meggelen regarding the lack of integration between PBX�s and carriers.At a recent telephony conference, we saw many telcos reporting about the progress on their open platform initiatives and how there was this glorious future for us all to look forward to. They showed slides and used all the right language about it. That’s all well and good, when it is nothing more than slides, with no definitive dates and nothing concrete about it all really. I’m sure the carrier is quite comfortable talking about open-platforms, as long as it’s slideware discussing some some ill-defined “out there” future.But how comfortable are they when the idea of an open platform, that really lets third-parties offer tightly-coupled services to their customers, stops being just an “idea” and becomes a reality, here and now?The picture below shows what the PhoneGnome technology, as a platform, does to the value chain (or application stack) when an end user plugs in that little CPE device:On the left, we have the closed vertical platform provided by carriers today. The same applies whether we’re talking about a traditional 130 year-old carrier, or an upstart 3-year old VoIP player. The supposedly revolutionary 3 year-olds simply copied their grandparents when it comes to opening their platform to third-party innovation.On the right, we have the result after a customer connects the PhoneGnome device. With PhoneGnome installed, the services stack above “access” (the local number and local services) is open to any third party provider, without the support or cooperation of the underlying telco access provider required. It is “unbundling” at the customer premise (or “unbundling at the edge”) without the nightmare that is traditional telco-based “unbundling”.“Open” is beyond the abstract and slideware now. With the installation of a simple enabling CPE device, anyone’s service (and brand) can now be seamlessly inserted into the experience for any existing fixed line user, any telephone number anywhere, without the requirement to partner with the underlying telco. It is a “pay as you grow” model with no requirement for a large initial cap-ex outlay. The footprint is immediately the entire world, anywhere there is broadband internet and POTS service. And it is here now, in use by real customers, and empowering real non-telco third-party services, provided directly to existing telco customers. [...]
April 24th, 2008 at 11:07 pm
[...] Saunders revisits the state of Voice 2.0 in a response to a post by Jim Van Meggelen regarding the lack of integration between PBX?s and [...]