Somebody likes it "Hot", everybody likes it "Flat"

The historic trend in telecommunications has been of revenues growing faster than the economy as a whole, at least over long periods of time, and this trend is likely to resume as we continue the evolution towards an economy based on information.

Content (defined here as material prepared by professionals for consumption by large audiences, in particular movies, recorded music, and professional sports team play) is a large and prosperous business.
However, it has never been as large or as important as connectivity, person-to-person communication.

Once a service becomes inexpensive enough, social uses begin to play a major role.
In fact, the general disdain for what is often called gossip has repeatedly misled decision makers.
Not only is there a lot of money in carrying gossip, but gossip plays a crucial role in all human interactions.
The myth of content as king has repeatedly led telecom to waste huge amounts of money trying to get into the content business.
Yet providing pipes for connectivity has always brought much more revenue than content distribution.

Voice is still what provides well over 70% of telecom service revenues.
In particular, the real telecom success story of the 1990s, whether measured in terms of revenue growth or number of subscribers, was in wireless voice, not on the Internet.

In their infatuation with data and especially with content, carriers appear to have given up on doing anything innovative with voice.
The new killer app. will be VoIP and we will have broadband pipes, whether wired or wireless, and voice will be just another service delivered over them at low or even zero cost.

This will be similar to what has happened with email, which has been and continues to be the killer app of the Internet.
But note that the importance of email is understood by ISPs, and it continues to get enhanced.
Not so with voice.
And yet there is much more that can be done with voice.

This is very strange, because voice is an extremely important human method of communication.
We all know that "one picture is worth a thousand words." But that is not quite right.

Pictures, photos, and video are all very important, but usually not by themselves.

What does seem to be true is that:
One picture is worth a thousand words, provided one uses another thousand words to justify the picture.

With convergence of consumer electronics, business information technology, telecommunications, and content, the action will be at the edges, in homes and businesses, melding all these elements together.

It will be local communication that will need to be provided in profusion, in order to allow for easy implementations of new services.


The telecom industry does not appreciate the need to encourage usage.
Technology is advancing, so bandwidth is growing, and the service providers that will win will be the ones who teach their customers how to use the increasing capacity of their links.

And nothing helps whet the appetite for bandwidth as much as flat rates and not having to worry about priorities and the like.