Wednesday, March 08, 2006

A Net Saturated World?



If I was an incumbent telco or wireless carrier I'd be kinda worried about this...

Currently there is a kind of "illusion" that you need phone company.
Just like when Edison was in the business of providing light, people figured out pretty quickly that what they really wanted was electricity. What people are figuring out now is that they want CONNECTIVITY.

Over time it's likely to become increasingly hard for incumbent telcos to support their existing business models. I think an argument can be made that the main purpose of their "new" network offerings (3G, EVDO, etc.) is to support their current business model and billing infrastructure. If their "Port Blocking" or throttling of bits associated with VoIP services like Skype and Vonage isn't evidence enough that they're freaked out, their terms of service which tightly control what customers can actually do over their new network connections oughta be... is this a value-added consumer experience?

Link to SmartMobs.

UPDATE: Mark Evans has some interesting, related info here.