As a growth strategy for the telecom industry, focusing investment on mobility and data services while withdrawing it from wireline voice is doomed to fail. People still depend on voice for the vast majority of their communication needs. Read More »
RSS Feed
Daniel Berninger
Recent Posts
Just as AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson is conceding to the permanent loss of wireline revenue, high definition (HD) is emerging as a way to save the all-but-abandoned asset. HD finally gives customers of AT&T and other telcos a reason to retain wireline connections,… Read More »
The iPhone and the Apple App Store may have set a new standard for design and availability of mobile apps, but the iPhone operates within the same decades-old voice quality constraints as other handsets. Indeed, the rapid pace of handset innovation does not change the fact… Read More »
A recent two-week visit to Ghana, Africa, offered up scenes that seemed frozen in time. Most of the buildings and infrastructure date back to the 1950s, before seven military coups over a period of 30 years made investment impossible. Open sewers remain the norm, modern… Read More »
The disruption potential of VoIP lies not so much in its ability to push down the cost of telephone service than in its ability to get consumers to ignore the telephone business altogether. The nature of the Internet makes VoIP advantageous even after the cost… Read More »
A growing number of people expect mobile phones to emerge as the dominant means of Internet access for the 6.6 billion people on Earth; as proof, they point to the 10 percent of the 2.5 billion handsets in circulation that already include such access. But there… Read More »
SIP-compatible VoIP devices already account for as much as 20 percent of landline telephone traffic. But mobile telephones will not remain a safe haven for long, as more companies start to offer VoIP alternatives to operator voice plans. Yet the displacement of analog phones by VoIP… Read More »
More Must Reads
A single commodity hard disk is fast on its way to being able to store every song ever recorded;* a close examination of how the rapid improvement of storage technology might apply to communication, therefore, is long overdue. Consider email, where the retention of messages… Read More »
The declining relevance of telephone directories erased 95 percent of publisher RH Donnelley’s market capitalization over the last 12 months. Although Google’s free 1-800-GOOG-411 service may attract some share of the directory assistance business, the crux of the problem lies with the diminished standing… Read More »
Vint Cerf’s 1974 TCP-IP specification and Tim Berners-Lee’s 1989 World Wide Web proposals remained little more than interesting academic ideas until the ease-of-use advances that arrived with the Mosaic web browser in 1993, which sent the click-to-information Internet jumping from a paltry 500 end points to… Read More »
The linked computer files we call the Internet can take many forms, but real-time communication is not one of them. Communication engages participants more intimately than linking computer files, and moving from hypertext to “hypercomm” will require the infocomm industry to cope with privacy, authentication and… Read More »
A transformation continues to gain momentum in telecom, with software innovation displacing big iron as the primary source of competitive advantage. But in order to have a telco-free nirvana, the infocom industry needs to produce compelling devices that go beyond features and functionality already available from… Read More »
The persistence of telephone numbers reflects the long-standing pursuit of innovations that serve the telephone company, not telephone customers. They are meaningless, and yet the wait for a mechanism that would reduce the need to keep track of them continues. Read More »
There exist a lot of practical reasons for carriers to embrace flat-rate calling, but it remains to be seen if any of the current plans will be expanded to the point of Internet-like, flat-rate levels. Indeed, the Internet’s 300 million consumer broadband connections remain the best… Read More »
Software patents deserve to die. What is needed instead is exactly the opposite — a formal process of contributing software innovations to the public domain. Read More »
As the world population continues to grow, making communication available to everyone becomes increasingly important. An infocom ecosystem expanding the reach of the infotech industry to communication holds more promise for our human network than the usual stewards of communication. Read More »
Infotech and telecom business models operate at opposite ends of the product vs. services spectrum. So for infotech companies looking to play a greater role in communications — notably to offer more options — they’ll need to do more than just replicate telecom models. Read More »
Most Commented
- 29 Today: Hands-on video with Tesla’s electric Model X
- 93 This Week: 7 signs that Android is faltering as iOS strengthens
- 69 This Month: Why we are buying paidContent
GigaOM TV
Now Loading…
Green Overdrive: Tesla’s Model X!
Cooler than a minivan, more practical than an SUV, it’s Tesla’s new…
Popular Now
Latest News
- Roku adds BBC iPlayer to bolster UK launch
- Hands-on video with Tesla’s electric Model X
- The first photos of Tesla’s electric SUV the Model X
- Say what? Google is going to do hardware? LOL!
- Google and affliction of me-too-ism
- Samsung Galaxy Tab 7.7: Video look at a speedy slate
- LinkedIn: Mobile growing fast in everything but revenue
