[84669] in North American Network Operators' Group
Re: Article - "skype killer" carrier grade app filter
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Fred Heutte)
Tue Sep 20 02:49:06 2005
From: Fred Heutte <aoxomoxoa@sunlightdata.com>
To: <nanog@merit.edu>
Date: Mon, 19 Sep 2005 18:45:18 -0700
Errors-To: owner-nanog@merit.edu
The cover story of the Economist this week (with a typical=
dollop
of hype called "How the internet killed the phone business") is
about Skype and VOIP as a "disruptive technology" (in Clayton
Christensen's sense) that is upending the wireline world but is
even more of a threat to the mobile/cellular carriers.
Skype has only a modest presence in the US now but the
worldwide numbers are pretty staggering:
Sandvine, a telecoms-equipment firm, estimates that there are
1,100 VOIP providers in America alone. But the trend is
worldwide. IDC, a market-research firm, predicts that the
number of residential VOIP subscribers in America will grow
from 3m at the end of 2005 to 27m by the end of 2009; Japan
already has over 8m subscribers today. Worldwide, according to=
iSuppli, a market-research firm, the number of residential VOIP=
subscribers will reach 197m by 2010. Even these numbers,
however, do not include people using VOIP without subscribing
to a service (ie, by downloading free software from Google,
Skype or others). Skype alone has 54m users.
http://www.economist.com/displaystory.cfm?story_id=3D4400704
Well, actually projected to have 54 million by December, up
from about 15 million at the beginning of the year. These are
the growth rates claimed for the net 10 years ago but which we
knew were overblown.
Of course not all of those "users" go much further than
downloading something and maybe trying it out. But obviously the=
Bell business model is dwindling fast and the life of the network=
operator only gets more, um, interesting.
Fred
