Me-too-ism is breaking out all over around internet phone calls. Skype are the big boys? Right? Sign up and see how many people are members in your town. In Peterborough today, it's 36.
No wonder Tesco are trying to get people to buy their internet phones with the promise of free calls to other Tesco signees (that could easily hit 2 in your town). BT may be the kiddies to get this one rolling.
Their total broadband package is plugging their free internet calls and a new online/offline phone is being made available in about a month. But the plan seems to be around getting as much cash as they can before people work out that skype can be genuinely free - and everyone abandons the landlines.
Even the new BT Broadband packages may amuse anyone who can see beyond the end of their nose. I've been offered a new faster broadband to 'prepare you for the future of on-demand TV and movies'. And no doubt that will be launched at me by BT very soon. This faster broadband 'preparation' includes free wireless router AND it'll cost me £2 a month less. Great.
Except it's limited to 6GB a month. Which is more than I currently use at home... but when on-demand TV arrives... well I dare say a lot of people will be stung for additional charges before realising how they've been done up like a kipper.
The further ahead you look - the faster you go | davidpcushman AT gmail.com | These are my views and my views only.
The stumbling block for Skype has always been the mass market's reluctance to go near anything perceived as technical and geeky.
ReplyDeleteTescos and BT have the massmarket knowledge, and if they can make it as simple as possible for people to sign up and enjoy, they'll be able to charge the massmarket a fee, while the more technical services will only ever supply for a niche market...
However...would it be difficult for Skype et all to reverse-engineer their way into Tescos/BT's system?
I discussed some of the above with Tomi T Ahonen (co-author of Communities Dominate Brands) and this is what he has to say about both BT's Fusion phone and about the potential for VOIP via wi-fi enabled phones. The critical element is ownership of the phone - because it's YOUR point of contact with YOUR community:
ReplyDeleteThis is what the man had to say: David - on fusion, BT and VOIP. I do believe in VOIP and WiFi on mobile phones. But the near term (next five years) opportunity is definitely on the side of the corporate/business customer. They do have an honest business need to "keep the employee fixed" - in very many cases.
Consider a calling centre. more and more of customer service is done by calling centres. For that, you just need to provide a small cubicle in a vast cubicle farm of 200 people or more, in a low-salary region (up North in the UK, or Ireland, India etc). Then a desktop PC and a VOIP phone (ie headset in this case). You don't WANT these people to wander away from their PC terminals. So "mobility" is actually a bad concept for this type of worker. That is why perhaps 20 million or more corporate VOIP phones have been sold by Cisco and Nortel and others.
But for the home? For "my generation" - I am 46 years old - it seems "logical" for a home to have a fixed phone line. And then, if my fixed telecoms provider, whether BT in Britain, KT in South Korea or DT in Germany offer a "wireless" phone for the home, that doubles as a mobile phone when I step out of the home, that does sound like a good "upgrade" of the home phone.
Except, that the paradigm has already shifted. NOBODY will "own" that home phone. When someone calls your wife, they don't call the home phone, they call her mobile phone. When someone calls your 17 year old daughter, all of her friends call her on her phone, never the home phone. Your 12 year old son, same story, except at that age its almost all SMS. And you? Your friends call you on your mobile.
So the home phone - no matter how cleverly wireless and perhaps cheap - is not used by anyone. Study after study have proven that people will be "lazy" and use their mobile phone rather than place calls on a fixed phone even when those calls might be cheaper or even free. But wait - so then what if you give this new home phone to one of your family members.
Yeah, good idea. Except, that each of them has a built-in loyalty to their brands and phones of preference. It has to be the slim and sleek Moto Razr. No I need my Nokia N-80 with its awesome video and camera. No I want my SonyEricsson Walkman for my music, etc. Nobody wants the Fusion phone.
That is why LG sells a million Chocolate premium smartphones in six months in Britain, while BT sells 35,000 Fusions in 12 months.
The Fusion idea would have been a killer in 1996. Its totally out of its market opportunity in 2006. Will never happen. Never.
What will eventually happen, is the major handset makers releasing WiFi phones (like my Nokia 9300i and my Nokia N-80 - and in fact my third cellular connection as well, my Vodafone data card manufactured by Qualcomm and also having WiFi as well). When these migrate down from the high end smartphones to the mainstream phones, we'll get a mass market opportunity for WiFi VOIP services. That will come. But a Fusion phone has no chance in this market contest against 100 new phone models by the big manufacturers every year.
And about being "settled" - water, electricity etc being settled but telecoms not? I'd say telecoms is rather solidly settled - all houses are built with telocoms wiring. But the technology has moved beyond this. I think its like gas, once a mainstay everywhere, gradually gas lines are diminishing, with households shifting to electricity in stead.
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