Go On, Listen to the Experts
Lee Dryburgh, eComm coordinator and telecom technology expert, sat down with Chief Analyst at STL Partners and long-time telecom strategist Martin Geddes a while back to mull over the short- and long-term industry effects of the telecom-broadband convergence. It was supposed to be a 15 minute conversation. It ran about an hour and 15 minutes. Yowza.
So what happens when you put two telecom thought leaders into a room to chat it up for 75 minutes? 2 things:
1. They confirm that mobile VoIP calling via the voice channel is the only viable solution, of course.
2. Jim Courtney takes notice.
You can hear the audio of the interview in its entirety here. But we’ll go ahead and share a few of our (and Jim’s) favorite excerpts with you.
For one, Lee sums up that when it comes to getting VoIP calling on mobile, “Ingeniously, Martin has been thinking of the Internet as a means of signaling and coordination rather than always also the best means of delivery.”
Martin proposes, “Why don’t we focus on allowing the “IP” part to do what it does well,” things like providing “presence data” and “location information….and let the phone[voice] network do what it does well, which is phone calls.”
He also points out that to get a 100% data-based VoIP calling system in place that will actually, reliably work for people, you essentially “have to throw an awful lot of [VoIP] technology at a problem [voice quality/delivery] that does not exist” otherwise.
Martin advises that we should “stop worrying about trying to do voice over IP until the technology is super duper mature until we can not possibly afford to maintain two networks -which is quite a long way away still.”
That’s what we’re saying.
*VoIP solution that sticks calls on the Voice network: Check!
*VoIP solution that uses the Internet as a “signaling system” to deliver presence info: Check!
So does this qualify our solution as (dare we say) “ingenious?”
As Jim Courtney says in his Skype Journal recap on the interview, “Sounds like iSkoot…may be on to something here.”
