[Asterisk-biz] VoIP Future and Asterisk -- For Teliax, LiveVOIP, NuFone, VoipJet, BroadVoice and all other IXPs

[Kenneth Shaw]

You're talking very different industries. Compare the type of products
sold. One sells a very expensive product that is purchased by a consumer
once every five to six years. The other sells a product that is
purchased in large quantities on a continual and regular basis -- namely
minutes per month.

Finding another comparable industry is difficult. The fledgling VoIP
industry would be better compared to power, water, or other public
utilities. In most countries in the world, public utilities are sold and
bought up at auction. The Edison Electrics of the world sell large
blocks of power, water, gas, whatever, to smaller companies which in
turn resell those to consumers. Sometimes the "smaller companies" are
regional or municipal governments, where government still owns the
electric, water and gas mains. Sometimes the "larger companies" are
national or international governments, where government still owns the
means of electric, water, or gas production. 

You'll find that this directly parallels what the VoIP industry is
doing: buying and selling telecom minutes from the line providers
(Qwest, AT&T, Global Crossing, Level3, The Peoples Republic of God Knows
Where), and selling that to the consumers. In this case, that's you or
me. 

The reason the utility auctions work is not every
government/company/location in the world has the resources, natural or
otherwise, to produce what consumers there need. It allows two things:
for those who have extra kilowatt/hours, extra gallon/minutes or extra
BTU/seconds to sell their excess supply and buy what they are missing.

Compare this to the VoIP world. Just like you probably don't have the
resources to setup a point of presence to telephone networks in every
single country, neither do I. But then again, I'm not calling
Afghanistan through Zimbabwe on a regular basis. However, I do sometimes
make calls to Germany, France, Australia, China, and a select others
maybe once, twice, three times a year. 

The utility auctions allow the utility companies to focus their energies
on production, and not on distribution or sales. It frees them to do
what it is they do best. They don't worry about making their employee
salaries next month, because they have a trusted, secure and independent
method for sales. These companies know that well, hell, if Zimbabwe
doesn't want to pay for these services, there will always be "the next
guy" who will.

My email was suggesting that as a community of VoIP companies (which is
what this forum really is), it would be possible to create the
equivalent for VoIP. And ultimately, in my mind, that's what people
want. 

Right now, all the Asterisk termination and origination providers are so
caught up in competing with each other and undercutting each other, that
the possibility for something greater is being missed. Look at all the
duplicity that exists in the VoIP world. Think of how many companies
have built their own billing system (that still doesn't work), or
support systems (which is never answered because five different
companies are so resource strapped they can only afford one-fifth of a
support person), or even the configuration and signup interfaces which
die more often than not. Consolidation and resource pooling is the only
way to go.

Let's be realistic. There are at minimum, 20 different companies right
now, that I could use for Asterisk termination, and probably 15 of those
provide origination. I don't know what all of these companies are
thinking, but they can't all be the next AT&T. Besides, that's what
Vonage is trying to be.

BTW, as a short aside to my rant, and followup to my last post, Yahoo
and Google both own/bought VoIP companies. 


On Fri, 2005-06-24 at 13:01 -0400, Shido Xavier wrote:
> Thats a great idea. Why haven't Chrysler, Ford, and GM done that using
> this kind of idea?
> 
> -Greg
> _______________________________________________
> Asterisk-Biz mailing list
> Asterisk-Biz at lists.digium.com
> http://lists.digium.com/mailman/listinfo/asterisk-biz

-- 
Kenneth Shaw
Director of Technology
ExpiTrans, Inc.
2428 Newport Blvd #8
Costa Mesa, CA 92627
tel: 949 278 7288
fax: 866 494 5043
ken at expitrans.com