One of the last, and most informative, sessions at VON was one on Trend Spotting. Moderated by Todd Keefe, it had Ofer Gneezy, Brough Turner, Don Price and Timothy Jasionowski offer their predictions of where the communications world was going.
There was a lot of discussion about mobile connectivity, specifically when voice would cease to be a premium service and would be carried "over the top" as just another application on top of a commodity data network. Given that voice is so lucrative, the incumbent operators are not only reactant to go that route but many of them are actively blocking services such as Skype. (And, as it turns out, the recently announced Skype phone doesn't use the Skype protocol at all but uses IP for signaling and conventional circuit-switched channels for voice.) Brough advanced his "Four or more and things go nuts" theory, based on his observation of developing countries where, once there are four or more wireless operators the weakest one will break ranks and start offering innovative services. Over lunch, Brough told me of a study recently done by one wireless operator which showed that if they just offered "dumb pipes" they would have a smaller but much more profitable business than they would by getting into the risky content and applications business. Given that Sprint recently spent $4B on 700 Mhz spectrum in the AWS auctions, the US should have four such operators by January of 2009.
I asked what other obstacles there were to over-the-top voice. One response was that the current idea of using WiFi would remain problematic due to WiFi inefficient power consumption, but that 3G, including WiMax, would solve that problem.
Another hopeful sign is that the Apple iPhone, Nokia's N95, and the forthcoming Google open source framework would wean customers away from dependence on subsidezed but anemic handsets provided by the mobile operators.
The one remaining prolem is, as Ofer put it, "every year, the next year is when data would break through, but voice is where all the money is today." When that happens, watch out!