We've seen the explosion in Voice over IP phone companies, using lower IP costs (and regulatory bypass) to offer very cheap long distance. Today, in the wholesale market, you can place VoIP calls to regular phone numbers in the major cities of the world for between 0.5 cents and 1 cent per minute. So cheap that companies are routinely offering people "unlimited" long distance plans for a flat monthly fee.

The rates are cheap, but they aren't yet free, so calls don't happen without contracts and plans and arrangements.

Here's something begging to be done: The cellular carriers in the USA and Canada should allow people calling in from the internet to call any cell phone for free.

This would cost them the tiny amount they get for terminating long distance calls to cell phones, but the end result would be their own customers billing more minutes. That's what they want (sort of.) They could release a free program for use on common PCs to call any cell phone. They could have a java applet or ActiveX control to make a web page to let you call any cell phone for free, just as they let you send an SMS from a web page for free. (If you have a headset with a mic, at least.)

But allowing free and open calling would encourage lots of innovating applications from the marketplaces. Smart PBXs would coordinate and connect with company cell phones over the internet. More advanced apps would link cell phones closer to PBX functions. People who use their cell as their home phone would have another reason to do it -- now all their friends can call free from VoIP phones or any PC. Companies like Vonage would offer free calls to cell phones even for people not on the unlimited plan.  read more »

One core reason I haven't blogged much in the last while is the flurry of activity regarding my annual trip to Burning Man. I've prepared a page about one of my too-many projects this year, which was to build an incongruous phone kiosk in the middle of the desert which worked and let you call anybody in the world for free. It was battery powered, and used 802.11 and Voice over IP combined with a satellite internet connection.

The reaction was remarkable and I have made a set of pages about phone booth and reaction to it. including pages on the building of it, galleries of photos of people using it (including, of course, naked people) and maps of all the places people called.

(I will probably submit this to slashdot next week to test my server!)

Now my goal was to take some highly familiar technology and put it in a place where it seemed impossible. And indeed, most people refused to believe it was "real" since there are other joke phone booths at Burning Man. Their disbelief and shock were what made it fun, as well as the emotional experiences and gratitude that came when people heard distant voices. It was a taste, in a small way, of what the phone meant when it was new.

I have much more stuff about Burning Man to blog in the days to come.

Voice over IP, a field I've been working in, has been generating some recent excitement. And that's appropriate.

However a lot of the talk is about something I consider the wrong direction. I call it PoIP, for PSTN over IP or worse, POTS over IP. (POTS, in turn, stands for Plain old Telephone Service.)

This is largely what you get from Vonage and AT&T CallVantage and similar companies. An effort to create a product very similar to the old style phone or PBX, just at a lower price. Yes, there are some differences -- a few cute features formely found only in higher end PBXs and so-called Intelligent switches, and of course the geography-independent nature of using your internet connection as the hookup.

But must of these new features are evolutionary. They aren't the "disruptive" change that we're really looking for. Indeed, in the early days, I used to joke that VoIP was "Not quite as good as the old telephone, but at least it's harder to configure."

It may be that reputation that scared people into making PoIP. They feel, perhaps correctly, that first they must convince the public that VoIP isn't scary, that it's very similar to the phone. And indeed, some customers need that convincing. But that train of thought never leads to a disruptive change, and Vonage will never survive being AT&T for a few bucks less.

Skype, for better or worse, was ready to give up the old world, and insist you use a PC to make calls. I've had investors insist there is no way people would pick up a mouse to make calls, but they are doing so.

A disruptive product is worse than the status quo in others, and does something new the old guard weren't expecting. VoIP users should embrace the internet, not just to jam it into the phone.