Vonage/Verizon

[richb at pioneer.ci.net (Rich Braun)]

It's interesting to see how the US technology marketplace has developed vs.
that of other countries.  The whole VoIP thing might wind up being a moot
point because Americans are jumping into mobile phones, leaving behind
landlines and their long-distance pricing scheme.

But outside the USA, SMS texting is far more common.  Why?  Because the
oligopoly of American cellular companies decided to charge a whole lot of
money for each SMS message.  Fortunately the Internet grew up in a way that
prevented anyone from successfully charging for Internet email.

The comparison of pricing is stark.  On the trip from which I just returned, I
found even the most poverty-stricken teenagers using their mobiles to send SMS
texts all day long.  When I got back I looked at the Cingular website to see
how much it would cost me to use the feature:  answer is 15 cents per message,
sent *or* received, so anytime someone sends a message, an American provider
gets 30 cents.  Price in the Philippines?  About 20-30 centavos: for 30 cents
you could send about *50* text messages.  You don't see people *talking* on
their phones very much because it costs about the same (a dime a minute, more
or less) to talk on the phone as it does in the USA, which makes voice much
less affordable for the local people there.  (Makes the restaurants and
trolleys much quieter!)

I observed  whole classes of SMS-based applications that we will never see in
the USA because they'd cost too much to deploy.  Other countries are able to
do things with this technology that we can't.  At least, not with SMS.  Our
future direction will instead probably require TCP/IP apps on our mobile
phones, to bypass the oligopoly.

Unless Verizon figures out a way to stop it.  Hmmph.

-rich


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