A Telecom Reality Check

Om Malik | Saturday, January 22, 2005 | 7:08 AM PT | 1 comment

Sometimes I wonder if I am the only one who is screaming-in-the-wind when it comes to pointing out the obvious foibles of fancy technologies that catch the imagination of Silicon Valley investors, press and of course the pundits, who pontificate, justify and enthuse with nary a thought about business - after all, technology business is all about making money - and economic realities. Well, I do seem to have found someone who thinks with the wrong-side of his brain - i.e., practically… Rui Carmo, who apparently works from some GSM operator and pens the wonderful Tao of Mac, writes today:

Rolling out (and expanding) country-wide networks takes literally years. Some things (if they prove to be financially viable, of course) are even planned to be rolled out years in advance of the technology being publicly available - or even visible to the end user. … So it is somewhat amusing reading pie-in-the-sky pieces from pundits harping on about vaporware like WiMax? or Wi-Fi-based VoIP being ‘just around the corner’, or gadget freaks lusting for the latest all-in-one pocket gizmo and wishing it had ‘free wireless broadband’, telepathic ringtones and a Pez dispenser”

1 comment so far

December 31st, 1969
5:59 PM PT
alessandro said:

i seem to understand wifi voip is a reality already at (link)

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