VoIP And Cell Phones Eroding Traditional Telecoms 390
Lullabye_Muse writes "Yahoo! reports that telecoms in Europe and U.S. are losing in response to people switching their home phones for cellphones and dial up to cable modems. More info on specific VoIP discussed in latter part of article. The trend seems to becoming widespread, I guess 10 years and all the old wires are gonna start to be taken down."
Never (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:A land-line...? (Score:5, Insightful)
Wires taken down? Dont think so. (Score:2, Insightful)
Cost (Score:3, Insightful)
Add in the fee to get connected, if you move a lot you can save hundreds by having a cell phone.
Currently the long distance plan I have, it doesn't yet make sense to switch to a cell phone.
Surprise surprise. (Score:5, Insightful)
Yet another example of innovation sweeping the market out from under an industry that's too busy screwing its consumers to notice.
They should take advantage of this opportunity ... (Score:3, Insightful)
Contrary to most people think, the major Internet backbones are not anywhere near capacity. Telcos have NO shortage of bandwidth. Their problem is their inability to push the bandwidth people demand over analog copper lines. Fiber solves bandwidth problems and distance problems.
-DJ
Monopolies are not all bad (Score:5, Insightful)
Of course there comes a time when the monopoly no longer makes and it will fade out. Most customers will benefit but soome (eg. less profitable customers in outlying areas) will lose out.
Re:Never (Score:5, Insightful)
What about DSL? (Score:5, Insightful)
What about DSL?
Not everyone will have FITL (fiber-to-the-curb), so the existing copper lines will still have a use.
Chip H.
Two disagreements (Score:5, Insightful)
Second, the "old wires" are not "gonna start to be taken down." There is a billion dollar infrastructure buried under the U.S. that's going nowhere. And a century of tweaking has made it rock solid. A new generation growing up on wireless phones won't appreciate the five nines of reliability that the PSTN provides, but most of the population is nowhere near ready to give up the phone line that stays up during power failures.
That said, the future is certainly IP based. The phone company knows that and will be well positioned to be the dominant provider. The RBOCs and the cable companies are the only players likely to survive in the broadband and IP-based future.
Re:A land-line...? (Score:4, Insightful)
When I wanted to get my home net connection, I had a choice between 5mb/1mb cable dsl or 3mb/0.5mb adsl - except that I would have had to also pay for a land line with adsl, so the faster cable connection is actually cheaper. It's a no-brainer (and my IP never changes with cable - an extra bonus for my home server).
Re:Monopolies are not all bad (Score:5, Insightful)
Monopolies aren't always bad, as you said. The problem with the way we see monopolies is that most of them take advantage of it to shaft the customer (on price, service, or anything else). It's when you mix monopolies with proffit motivations above all else that you get in real trouble. A benevolent monopoly can be good, as you said. Unfortunatly, I doubt we'll ever see benevolent monopolies (or even corporations) ever again. They just seem to get greedier and greedier.
Of course, in most situations, a nice open market if best.
Re:I miss ma bell (Score:5, Insightful)
The main advantage you now see from the breakup is competition, however feeble, and lower pricing.
Oh, and customer service has always sucked. It's not a new phenomenon.
Poor Poor Big Huge Companies... (Score:4, Insightful)
Now you think 'poor poor big company' because they're forced to service those remote areas and now they aren't getting the growth they have anticipated? WRONG...
These companies are not forced to stick to old technologies. They have decided to stick to technologies for as long as they can, but the telco company could be offering much better solutions to everyone but they were 'comfortable' with the situation. They wanted to milk the old technology for all it had. Instead of spending all the resources trying to install new technologies in everyone's homes, they were trying to squish the new technology. Remember all those attempts at lobbying for internet taxes and things? Those were attempts to make internet more expensive than typical communications so they wouldn't have to change their ways. Their thoughts were, "Why install new technology when we haven't made our projected return on your current technology?". The answer is obviously, "To save your company from being obsoleted by the companies installing the new technologies."
Spot on. (Score:5, Insightful)
If i had the points i had last night, i'd mod you through the roof. This is the most insightful and true statement i've seen today.
i hate to be a defeatist, but fucking christ, who isn't trying to fuck you these days? It's not enough to have a chalet on some remote lake anymore is it? It's not enough to have 7+ figures in the bank is it?
i just grow more and more disheartened that there are no truly benevolent companies in monopolistic positions these days. i won't glorify the "good ol' days" and sure as hell, there were sharks in those days, but i can't help but feel that i'm getting fucked, about to get fucked, or have the research to realize that, yeah, i am getting fucked by some company.
Shit, maybe i'm just out of touch, but i'd hoped that by the age of 26 i'd not be so goddamn cynical and have to watch my back at every fucking turn....like maybe, just maybe, some corps just might give a fuck that i live to next year and buy the next edition. Know what i mean?
Fuck, i already sound like my grandfather and at least he got be 50 before he was an ass about everything.
Re:A land-line...? (Score:3, Insightful)
There's much more than a wire between your phone and the one you're calling. Your voice gets digitized at a switch fairly near your home, after which it's split into chunks so you can send multiple "lines" down the same fiber optic cable. Along the way, these packets of data go through other switching equipment that sends your voice to wherever it's going, possibly over many different links for load balancing and redundancy in case a backhoe operator digs somewhere s/he shouldn't.
Now, it seems to me the only differences between the phone network and VOIP is a) the A/D conversion happens much closer to your phone, and b) the network is the Internet.
I don't mean to say that VOIP is reliable; I'm just pointing out that the phone company has the same points of failure as VOIP. The cable/DSL company might need access to your premises more often to swap out the modem, but reliability beyond that is up to the company.
Of course, there's probably fewer DDoS attacks on the phone company networks, but that's another story [slashdot.org]...
Wow... (Score:4, Insightful)
Cell phone are the intermediate future, and VoIP (in the real sense, not in the sense that they're still connected at all to the copper wires, but just connected to the real internet) or just plain Data over IP ('cos what else is Voice?) is the future.
Especially with wireless becoming cheaper and cheaper; what's gonna evolve is a free system of comms (wifi mesh, whatever) run by hobbyists, where the only role the telecoms are going to play is maintaining the fibreoptics between continents, large companies and cities which aren't easily connected by wireless (in all it's forms).
What's really surprising is that the telco's didn't see this coming: I have a friend who worked for the largest (formerly only) telco in the netherlands, and hwen I told him about this, his response was..."but....but...that's illegal!?". He really didn't understand the power of public airwaves...and he was in strategic planning too!
The only danger of course is that the telco's will lobby gov'ment to restrict private access to public bands....
nice! (Score:1, Insightful)
Might have some good dvds lying around too!
And if you clean-up they might not even notice!
(or ya could be really cool and teach him how to setup passwords and pay for your own frickin' service)
Re:A land-line...? (Score:3, Insightful)
when the mobiles get more popular expect the payphones to gradually disappear from the scene only to remain in places like airports.
that's what happened over here anyways..
Re:Spot on. (Score:1, Insightful)
New rules (Score:4, Insightful)
The old telecom companies are embracing this technology for several reasons:
The consumer wants to head this direction (anyone remember the age of passenger rail in the US?).
It is truly cheaper to provide this service, it's more efficient and may mean increased profitability.
They do know how to provide telephony and know that their customers will trust their offering.
They have not totally besmirched their name yet.
It has never cost telephone companies anything more to send a telephone call across the country or next door. The higher prices they were allowed (by governments) to charge for "long distance" were allowed to enable them to build their infrastructure. The higher prices we pay for cellular service reflects the need of cell phone companies to build out infrastructure so that they can serve their customers everywhere.
Now, telephone companies are finding that there is not just their infrastructure, but a whole new and cheaper infrastructure out there that was built without their investment. Some was paid for by the governments, some was paid for by private industry or other telephone companies. And they can use it -- free! Imagine the increases in profitability when you can sell a service that costs you little or nothing.
Here in the US, one of the reasons why VOIP from telecom companies is so cheap is because the playing field changed. They set up different companies for VOIP and cellular service and these companies don't have labor unions. So not only is the infrastructure cheaper, but labor is cheaper.
I note that BT immediately jumped on this bandwagon. They are, perhaps, the most hated company in the UK because they have held a monopoly for so long and refuse to bring pricing down to more sane levels in favor of keeping profits up. I kind of wonder at BT because they have generated a great deal of animosity in the public they "serve" in exchange for profits that are not visibly plowed into improved infrastructure.