On Wed, 8 Aug 2001, cfb wrote:
> Fact of the matter is that there is still quite a bit of money
> to be made from the landline sector. It is, by far, less risky
> and more predictable (espically in Japan where even a single phone
> line costs ~US$500 to acquire).
I should think that this would in fact make wireless a much more reliable
source of revenue. This sort of expense is what pushed me to go with
a keitai and PHS data, and completely abandon the concept of getting a
land line.
By-the-by, is there any new news on NTT's plans to drop the one-time
charge to buy a phone line? Interestingly enough, I'd heard it was not
wireless providers and the like that objected to this as much as the
companies who buy large numbers of phone lines. They've apparently put
all the phone lines on their books as assets at Y70,000 each or whatever
it costs, and will have to take a huge writeoff if that charge is dropped.
> Finally, in the land of the great telco experiment(s) (the USA),
> predictions of free long distance have yet to come true. In
> fact, if you've watched the trends over the last 10 years, it
> has become obvious the regonal and long distance carriers have
> actually increased revenues by dramatically increasing the
> number of area codes....
While I'm not an export on this, I believe this to be an incorrect
assessment.
First, the new area codes are simply to deal with the greater number of
telephone numbers that need to be made available in any given geographical
area, and have nothing to do with whether a call is a long-distance call
or not. When I lived in Manhattan, for example, I had local access to
numbers in at least six area codes (212, 718, 201, 917, 646, 347). On the
other hand, if you live in Victoria, British Columbia, you certainly do
not have local service to everything in the 250 area code (which covers
the entire province outside of Vancouver).
Second, long distance calls within the US are pretty darn close to free
right now, at least for the long distance portion. An inter-exchange
carrier (IEC) that carries calls between states has to pay the local
exchange carriers (LECs) at either end a "local access charge" to
compensate it for carrying the call between the subscriber and the
IEC. This charge is, last I checked. 3.8 cents per minute in total. (The
amount of this charge is set by the FCC.) So the long distance service
itself costs hardly over a penny a minute. (If you bought a dedicated
link between you and the IEC you use, as some large companies do, you
wouldn't pay the local access charge.)
> The other side to your propsition (that high
> bandwidth, low latency, always on wireless connections will
> produce the opportunity for free voice service) is like arguing
> that there exists a viable market niche for telegraph serivce.
> (and to a degree, you might be right, because anyone willing to
> invest a couple hundred dollars and a few hours of time can send
> free wireless telegraph messages! unfortunatly, the number of
> people to whom the message can be sent represents about .001%
> of the general phone using population).
I'd disagree with that. "Free" voice service right now would be easy
enough to run over the Air-H" 7000 yen per month unlimited data service
if we only had some sort of decent interface to it. It would certainly be
possible to build a custom-keitai that would use this. But more likely
you'd just wait a few years and make it a software program that you'd
download on to one of the keitai-computers that are starting to grow up.
At which point the telcos may have to come to their senses and impose
some sort of limit on (or even drop) the all-you-can-eat plans.
cjs
--
Curt Sampson <cjs@cynic.net> +81 3 5778 0123 de gustibus, aut bene aut nihil
"The chain which can be yanked is not the eternal chain."
-- G. Fitch
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Received on Thu Aug 9 05:50:06 2001