Pensieri di un lunatico minore

Sunset over landline services

With rumored layoffs at SunRocket, along with the problems facing anyone actually trying to charge for VoIP, I am wondering if the time of the landline service is over. In large swaths of the world, mobile phones are the norm, and landlines are becoming an oddity.

While the rise of the mobile industry overseas can be attributed to the existing acclimation of the populace to per-minute charges, it also is likely tied to the fact that in most countries—the US is a notable exception—the caller pays all fees, not the receiver. Combine these two pieces with the fact that the costs of landlines in Europe throughout the 1980s and 1990s were outrageous compared to the all-you-can eat American telecom buffet. That is changing, though, with more and more people depending on their mobile phones, and thereby acclimated to the per-minute costs.

I gave up my landline several years back, and honestly, I don’t miss it, and don’t ever intend to restore it. With the decreasing bandwidth impact of voice, at least from a percentage perspective, and the rise of video and music, along with general web surfing, the infrastructure costs of voice are no longer what they used to be. Fitting a voice call into a broadband connection is like shoving a swizzle stick into a fire hose. It just doesn’t matter.

I don’t think that any company whose foundation is “voice,” is going to be able to make it any more. If you look at Verizon, they’re effectively betting-the-store on FiOS, and the impact on their reputation, at least in the technorati, is gigantic. For Verizon, or even Comcast, voice isn’t the driver of their infrastructure any more, and hasn’t been for several years.