End of the Line
VoIP momentum just gets faster and faster.
The Economist is running an excellent story on the recent eBay acquisition of Skype.
The story makes the point that the inevitable day when telephone calls are free has only been reaffirmed with the Skype acquisition. And right up to that day, VoIP and services such as Skype are going to continue to ruin telco numbers and models; time and distance are simply no longer an issue.
Only this morning, Trevor Sykes ran an excellent article in the subscription-only weekend edition of The Australian Financial Review (Telstra battered but it's still concerned) on the woes of Telstra as it faces an increasingly rapid decline in PSTN revenues, thanks to the uptake of mobiles, wireless and VoIP.
On that note, I attended a Service Providers Association Inc. (SPAN) conference a few weeks ago and it was predicted by Mark Hollands, VP APAC Strategy and Business Development, Gartner, that telephony over PSTN will entirely die out by 2015.
VoIP - and especially consumer VoIP - is starting to become mainstream, and not a moment too soon.
