Anyone in their garage can now be a telephone company...

Jim Kohlenberger blogs on VoIP
Excerpt:

VoIP has decoupled voice from the physical infrastructure itself. Now it can go independent of who your physical provider is. Of course, this challenged incumbent interests in that regard. Because of this decoupling it has allowed many new things. Microsoft build SIP (the protocol) just like HTML (http) and FTP, SIP is a protocol. Anyone in their garage can now be a telephone company for the entire planet. In shopping e-commerce you can get a voice rep. You can do online voice conferences. Included in game boxes and game consoles where kids use VoIP to communicate. Used in instant messaging. Star-trek type communicators are now used in Hospitals (Wi-fi based). All sorts of other things. Skype. Free World Dialup. Metcalf’s law: value of Internet goes up as you can talk to more people. New companies are broadband VoIP providers. Vonage, 8x8, etc. Plug in a regular phone to IP network and make calls. All types of new services are possible. Right now they look like regular telephones because that is what we expect. Many things are possible in the future. Question is how do we get there? How do we allow them to flourish so these new services can be made possible?

COMMENT:
On : 3/25/2004 7:27:06 AM Joshua Ruihley (www) said:

The "Jim Kohlenberger" post on Smart Cog isn't actually a blog posting by Jim. The post is of my notes from his presentation at the Internet Commons Congress yesterday.