Its true, VoIP changes everything. And maybe not just for the obvious reasons. Sure, its cool to make voice calls over Skype, and “Voice is just another data-stream” and “packets are packets, whether email or voice” and all of that cool stuff, but let’s dig deeper.
Let’s look at the handset vs. the carrier. What’s going on here? Its been a convenient marriage until now - handset manufacturers supply handsets to the carriers and they both win. But there is a tension emerging between carrier and handset. Opportunity is opening up on the handset to do TONS of cool new stuff - massive attention being given to wireless mobile devices. Convergence devices. Things like smartphones, wireless entertainment devices, lifedrives (maybe even wireless ipods).
Carriers are terrified of this stuff.
They are terrified of user control and off-network connectivity like wifi and bluetooth. These technologies empower the user, not the carrier. They just want to keep selling ring tones (and other content).
Verizon’s 1000’s of customers had to petition Verizon to offer a Treo smartphone. Many carriers cripple the bluetooth functionality on their phones so that you have to send files through THEIR network, not the local bluetooth network. Carriers have veto’ed the itunes phone - scared of too much local connectivity not passing through their network. Any app that you try to bundle with a carrier-based handset must go through a very long approval process. Red tape. Slow. Telecom-time.
Meanwhile the rest of us live on Internet-time. Rapid development, rapid deployment. There is a massive growing backlog of mobile apps - apps that cannot be deployed without carrier approval. These apps are looking for a platform that affords much quicker time-to-market. A platform that can move on Internet time. What happens when you don’t need a carrier in order to make a voice call? What happens when you can dial as easily as you can play a PSP game with your friend over WiFi? VoIP is the catalyst for a new breed of mobile apps that will spread on Internet-time instead of Telecom-time. Its coming, brace for it.