Telephony, like most other media, is going through a digital convergence revolution that would transform it into one kind of data on the ultimate data transfer channel: the Internet. In telephony, however, the transformation is almost complete. In a fe…

In addition to Om Malik’s posting on whether VOIP service providers will have to pay access fess to ILECs and CLECs, Voxilla’s Carolyn Shuk writes the new FCC chair Kevin Martin is nowhere near as VOIP-friendly as his predecessor, Michael Powell. Mar…

As someone who enthusiastically waves the flag for VOIP, I’m troubled by Om Malik’s posting on whether the FCC will let ILECs and CLECs charge access fees to VOIP service providers such as Vonage. These fees would be a major setback for VOIP because …

Om Malik posts today “Maybe the VoIP-Provider Model is Broke?” which follows a post “So Much for AT&T VoIP”. Still this is not a story about AT&T’s inability to get traction with Call Vantage, it’s the deeper reference in Om’s post to what the F…

The regulators will have a hard time if VOIP traffic reaches the tipping point where enough calls are IP to IP and there is no phone company at all. Could you tax email? Users would simply download inter-operable voicemail applications onto their IP phone and call other IP phones. IP addresses become phone numbers (indirectly). Simply, it depends on Metcalf’s law, that the value of the network increases by the number of “nodes.” In this case, nodes, or phones, that are free of the plain old telephone network.

The area of value, as you point out below, will be in the quality of the connection, which will allow this type of network to work reliably. Also, as JC Francois points out below, we don’t know what will be acceptable quality for VOIP. We do know that given a “better” internet connection, the liklihood of quality service inproves on one side of the call. The call itself has a cost of zero. And that is alluring.

No one knows if we will reach this tipping point, but if we do, I do not know how it could be directly regulated.