Forum Archive Index - June 2000

["Jeremy Ardley" <jeremy@ardley.wattle.id.au>]

The logic doesn't follow.  It costs a lot of money to run and maintain a telecommunications network.  That is why it is cheaper for Iridium to torch all their satellites than to continue to run them.

 

Irrespective of new technologies the network has to get revenue.  Quite possibly phone charges and data rates will converge, but none will go to zero. When you look at telecoms costs, the last half mile is the highest costs item in provisioning and maintenance. I expect that most likely the cost of long distance calls will go down while local call- will rise slightly till they meet. 

 

Another probable outcome is a fixed monthly fee for unlimited local and long distance voice calls / access charges and a per gigabyte data charge for your data usage for other services.

 

There will be hiccups in this evolution, the most likely data technology soon will be high bandwidth WAP services, replacing fixed lines to an extent.  This will be supplemented/superseded for ultra high bandwidth applications by fibre to fixed locations.

 

All these new technologies cost money to implement so don't expect any radical end user phone cost changes other than distance convergence for the next 10 years at least.

 

Jeremy

 

 

----- Original Message -----

 

I haven't read the article yet but it is indeed inevitable. As it is currently you can get free access to the internet. There are more and more products coming on to line that allow you to make telephone calls over the net. Net2phone is one I can think of off the top of my head. I'm not sure what the charges are for this service but one can see that the way things are heading much of our telecommunication will eventually be free. 

 

Cheers.