Alec Saunders SquawkBox

Last post was December 4th. Did they all go on vacation?

Apparently there will be big news from Skype tomorrow.  KaplowPR dropped me one of those “stay tuned” notes.  I wonder if it has anything to do with hardware?  Arne at the Unwired Net in Germany wrote just an hour ago that today (which is tomorrow, already, in Germany) Skype has launched its public beta of Skype for Windows Mobile 2.2, and there are now 120 different Windows Mobile smartphones supported.  That looks very interesting, especially since Skype is claiming to have solved some of the power consumption problems.

The boys from Estonia keep on rolling. 

Meanwhile, Martin Geddes has just gone through my SunRocket Experience, except with his bank, who telephoned him and required that he reveal a bunch of personal information before they would tell him what the call was about. It turned about to be Spoot (Spam on Ordinary Telephony).  Love the term, Martin!  And he observes that it will be a while before the whole world is using Skype, and this issue is no longer a concern.

If you’re still waiting for an open user-owned telephony system, forget it. Private and proprietary is in for the foreseeable future. At present I also don’t see any prospect of the PSTN evolving to become a new telephony system that solves relevant needs for its users. I look forwards to being proven wrong!

Depressing, but likely true.

Free-marketers won the day in Canada, yesterday.  Industry Minister Maxime Bernier declared that there is no need to regulate local telephony service in markets where there is sufficient competition.  That means most Canadian cities, except in rural markets.

On Monday, Industry Minister Maxime Bernier gave BCE (Bell Canada), Telus and the country’s other incumbent telcos the power to set their own prices, as long as there is sufficient competition in the local area.

Let the price wars begin.

Consumers will be the big benefactors here.  Until now, cable companies have priced their products based on a “rational pricing” model.  The thinking has been that since their competition is regulated, all they have to do is price a little under the competition, and maximize profits.  With this ruling, the gloves are off.  Expect prices to fall as the telco’s and cable providers go to the mat for market supremacy.  It’s only a matter of time before some trigger happy cable exec ignites a gunfight with an offer like “get telephone with your cable for just $10/month more”. 

The most vulnerable to this ruling are the alternative competitive voice providers that have popped up in recent years.  The internet service providers who offer voice, or small carriers like my local favorite Unlimitel or the slightly bigger fish like Vonage.

I signed up for Inveslogic today.  It gives you keyword / filtering control over a bunch of blog searches, and delivers summaries to your mailbox.  So far it seems like a good service.

What got me going, though, was the headline from 24/7 Wall St which said Microsoft Goes After the Phone Company.  The premise behind the story is, believe it or not, 100% dead wrong.  Author Doug McIntyre spun a story about a private beta of Microsoft Communications Server 2007 — an enterprise voice platform designed to work in conjunction with PBX products from companies like Avaya, Cisco and Mitel — into a bad news story for AT&T, Verizon, British Telecom, and Deutsche Telekom. McIntyre writes:

With the cable companies already providing these functions to consumers, the Microsoft move into the business market is another blow to companies like Verizon, AT&T, British Telecom, and Deutsche Telekom that rely on fixed line revenue for a larger portion of their revenue.

Whether they can replace these dollars with money from new TV services is still open to question. But, if Microsoft is moving into the market, the odds are getting worse.

Hunh?  Talk about stretching for a story.  Enterprise servers really have nothing to do with carriers, and McIntyre should know that.   

McIntyre’s post is disclaimed with the following helpful text: “He does not own securities in companies that he writes about.” Clearly one could also add ”He does not know anything about the companies he writes about, either.”

My hoster, bluehost, has had me locked out of the blog since yesterday afternoon.  They upgraded their PHP which blew up wordpress.  It’s been ugly…