Re: Article - "skype killer" carrier grade app filter

[Fred Heutte <aoxomoxoa () sunlightdata com>]

The cover story of the Economist this week (with a typical dollop
of hype called "How the internet killed the phone business") is
about Skype and VOIP as a "disruptive technology" (in Clayton
Christensen's sense) that is upending the wireline world but is
even more of a threat to the mobile/cellular carriers.

Skype has only a modest presence in the US now but the
worldwide numbers are pretty staggering:

  Sandvine, a telecoms-equipment firm, estimates that there are
  1,100 VOIP providers in America alone. But the trend is
  worldwide. IDC, a market-research firm, predicts that the
  number of residential VOIP subscribers in America will grow
  from 3m at the end of 2005 to 27m by the end of 2009; Japan
  already has over 8m subscribers today. Worldwide, according to
  iSuppli, a market-research firm, the number of residential VOIP
  subscribers will reach 197m by 2010. Even these numbers,
  however, do not include people using VOIP without subscribing
  to a service (ie, by downloading free software from Google,
  Skype or others). Skype alone has 54m users.

http://www.economist.com/displaystory.cfm?story_id=4400704

Well, actually projected to have 54 million by December, up
from about 15 million at the beginning of the year.  These are
the growth rates claimed for the net 10 years ago but which we
knew were overblown.

Of course not all of those "users" go much further than
downloading something and maybe trying it out.  But obviously the
Bell business model is dwindling fast and the life of the network
operator only gets more, um, interesting.

Fred