Alec Saunders SquawkBox

Andy thinks that T-Mobile's submarine play is UMA, and that Truphone, with it's use of WiFi to carry phone calls, is the competition's answer to UMA.   Go read his reasoning.

I'm not sure I totally agree.  Not that Truphone doesn't have a great service, but ultimately UMA plays (and indeed, all alternate wireless services) are about price.  We seek to use WiFi hotspots because they're cheaper. 

Nope, I actually think that another of Andy's clients, Mobivox, may be just as big a play.  Mobivox offers local dial access numbers in 35+ countries.  When you call the number, you speak with an IVR (the lovely VoxGirl), who then routes your calls at VoIP-alicious prices to wherever you want.  All from your mobile handset… or if you prefer, from a wireline handset.  Calls between Mobivox subscribers are free.  Calls from Mobivox to Skype are free as well.

Why is this better than WiFi?  One word.  Ubiquity.  Like it or not, WiFi networks aren't everywhere, and cellular networks are.  With smart use of mobile pricing plans, you can basically call  anyone you want for next to nothing. For example, here in Canada I pay $15/month for Rogers MyFive, which allows me an unlimited number of calls and text messages to and from any of five numbers on any networks.  T-Mobile has a similar program in the US called MyFaves.  So I set my MobiVox local access number as one of my five.  Next I loaded my entire address book into the MobiVox system (note… it's still beta and it's very slow with 2000+ address book entries).  Now I can call anywhere in North America from my cellular phone for 1.9 cents per minute, and no airtime charge. 

When I compare Truphone to Mobivox, here's where I end up. Truphone calls are free, from WiFi hotspots.  Outside a hotspot, I pay normal airtime charges.  MobiVox costs me 1.9 cents a minute, except between Mobivox subscribers.  Whether Truphone or Mobivox is better for you will totally depend on the kind of mobile user you are.  If you're on the road all the time, Mobivox is the best choice.  If you're one of those people who makes a lot of cellular calls from the office, then Truphone is the better choice.    However you do the math, though, consumers come up the winner. 

We had a light frost over the weekend, which forced me to gather in the remainder of hot peppers from the garden.  It's been an odd season, with the late heat in September allowing some of the slowest peppers to ripen finally.  So we have sweet hungarian banana peppers, fiery habaneros, spicy sweet ripened jalapenos, little firecracker serranos, and bizarrely twisted cayenne all coming from the garden in September.  Hot peppers in September… perhaps one of the few benefits we can ascribe to global warming. 

Autumn is the time when the last of the garden that we planted in May, with such high expectations, is harvested and the plants die off.  We wait for another spring, another planting, and another set of expectations. This year Autumn has also become a time when many in the VoIP industry have reflected on what has been accomplished, and what still needs to be done.  A number of people, including myself, have publicly said that VoIP is boring. Voice packets carried on IP networks means exactly what to consumers?  Right. Who really cares?

Tom Evslin, reflecting on a decade old prediction, says that VoIP won't improve the phone experience we have today… it will replace it.  Jeff Pulver riffs on Tom's themes, including the rise of social networks in the communications fabric, and promises more in his industry perspective talk at Fall VON.  Mike Gotta bemoans the lack of progress on presence, and calls on the industry to stop intellectualizing and start implementing. 

They're all right. 

The most exciting area in communications today is the mashup of the web and communications, and no where is that more evident than in social networks.  As web services APIs have allowed applications to communicate directly with communications servers, and networks have allowed those applications to be distributed across the globe, new forms of communications are starting to take hold.

VoIP hasn't failed.  On the contrary, it's created an environment where the only way that companies can survive in the communications business is by focusing on other parts of the experience.  Commodity transport of voice packets is about as cheap as it's going to get.  What's next?  And will the companies that have given us voice for the last 125 years be the same ones that offer us communications services for the next 125 years?  Or are they in the autumn of their years?

See you at Fall VON.  I'll be spending most of my time in the Innovators track. 

On Saturday I took advantage of Rogers 30 day moneyback guarantee and returned the Rogers Portable Internet WIMAX modem I wrote about last week.  The reason for returning it boiled down to value.  I purchased it hoping to be able to use it for occasional travel.  If you make a couple of trips per month in Canada, then spending a few dollars with Rogers for a guaranteed internet connection sounded like a great deal. However, the service was so weather affected that I was really only able to get acceptable performance from it for a couple of hours over the Thanksgiving weekend.  $49.95 per month for that level of service was hard for me to justify, given how often I expected to use it.

The process of purchasing and returning this unit, by the way, was one of the more surreal customer service experiences I've dealt with in some time.  It began when I spotted a great looking deal on the Shop Rogers website.  Rogers was apparently offering a full year of service on their Rogers High Speed Portable Internet service (not the cheesy 256K service) for $19.95 per month, and had waived the $29.95 installation fee.  Printing the offer, I made a trip to my local Rogers store, only to discover that the offer was apparently not available through the store.  The rep, a terrific young guy named Patrick, spent 45 minutes talking with different people at Rogers.  When he had made no progress and I needed to leave, he suggested I simply buy the modem, call the customer line myself, and if I was dissatisfied I could then return the modem on the 30 day moneyback guarantee.

So I did.

Later that day I telephoned and spoke with a young woman named Sarah.  It turned out, in fact, that the ShopRogers site was misleading.  Very misleading! The page for the High Speed Rogers Portable Internet service asked you to "Click here to view our special introductory offer", which took you to a page offering "Pay $19.95 for 12 months", which then took you to a page offering portable internet for $49.95 per month less a $5 promotional offer.  You can see for yourself below.

I expected that Sarah would simply honour the offer made on the site.  After all, anything less would be false advertising, would it not?  Sarah, however, offered me a $100 discount.  When I objected, noting that the site offered a $30 x 12 month discount for High Speed Rogers Portable Internet, plus an additional $29.95, or $389.95, she then offered $150.  I asked to speak with her supervisor.  Perhaps the supervisor had the authority to honour Rogers offer. 

This is where we entered the twilight zone. 

The supervisor began by informing me that since I hadn't accepted Sarah's offer, it was now "off the table". When I tried to show her the offer on the internet, she explained that she didn't need to look at the web site because she already knew all the offers.  After arguing with me for 10 minutes about the offer, she finally looked at the web site, and acknowledged that there was a misleading offer there. After speaking with her for a further 10 minutes, she offered one month of free service, a $49.95 value and stonewalled on any further compensation. The supervisor, instead of fixing the situation, had only made it worse. 

Wondering if I could get any satisfaction from ShopRogers, I called their line and spoke with a young lady there. She immediately saw the problem, and offered to submit a trouble ticket to the ShopRogers website, in order to ensure that others weren't similarly mislead.  She also offered a $49 credit on the modem, and an additional month of service. 

It was a very frustrating and weird experience.  Never have I seen the "it's off the table" tactic used against consumers.  Nor have I have ever seen a company as unwilling to honour a published offer as Rogers was.  Moreover, as of five minutes ago, the web site still hasn't been fixed so they're still pulling the same bait and switch tactic on anyone else looking to buy Rogers Portable Internet. 

As for me, I have the $99 price of the modem back in hand, and I'm glad I didn't commit to 12 months of service at even $19.95.  It simply wasn't worth it for the amount of use I intended to make of it.