You're talking very different industries. Compare the type of products sold. One sells a very expensive product that is purchased by a consumer once every five to six years. The other sells a product that is purchased in large quantities on a continual and regular basis -- namely minutes per month.
Finding another comparable industry is difficult. The fledgling VoIP industry would be better compared to power, water, or other public utilities. In most countries in the world, public utilities are sold and bought up at auction. The Edison Electrics of the world sell large blocks of power, water, gas, whatever, to smaller companies which in turn resell those to consumers. Sometimes the "smaller companies" are regional or municipal governments, where government still owns the electric, water and gas mains. Sometimes the "larger companies" are national or international governments, where government still owns the means of electric, water, or gas production. You'll find that this directly parallels what the VoIP industry is doing: buying and selling telecom minutes from the line providers (Qwest, AT&T, Global Crossing, Level3, The Peoples Republic of God Knows Where), and selling that to the consumers. In this case, that's you or me. The reason the utility auctions work is not every government/company/location in the world has the resources, natural or otherwise, to produce what consumers there need. It allows two things: for those who have extra kilowatt/hours, extra gallon/minutes or extra BTU/seconds to sell their excess supply and buy what they are missing. Compare this to the VoIP world. Just like you probably don't have the resources to setup a point of presence to telephone networks in every single country, neither do I. But then again, I'm not calling Afghanistan through Zimbabwe on a regular basis. However, I do sometimes make calls to Germany, France, Australia, China, and a select others maybe once, twice, three times a year. The utility auctions allow the utility companies to focus their energies on production, and not on distribution or sales. It frees them to do what it is they do best. They don't worry about making their employee salaries next month, because they have a trusted, secure and independent method for sales. These companies know that well, hell, if Zimbabwe doesn't want to pay for these services, there will always be "the next guy" who will. My email was suggesting that as a community of VoIP companies (which is what this forum really is), it would be possible to create the equivalent for VoIP. And ultimately, in my mind, that's what people want. Right now, all the Asterisk termination and origination providers are so caught up in competing with each other and undercutting each other, that the possibility for something greater is being missed. Look at all the duplicity that exists in the VoIP world. Think of how many companies have built their own billing system (that still doesn't work), or support systems (which is never answered because five different companies are so resource strapped they can only afford one-fifth of a support person), or even the configuration and signup interfaces which die more often than not. Consolidation and resource pooling is the only way to go. Let's be realistic. There are at minimum, 20 different companies right now, that I could use for Asterisk termination, and probably 15 of those provide origination. I don't know what all of these companies are thinking, but they can't all be the next AT&T. Besides, that's what Vonage is trying to be. BTW, as a short aside to my rant, and followup to my last post, Yahoo and Google both own/bought VoIP companies. On Fri, 2005-06-24 at 13:01 -0400, Shido Xavier wrote: > Thats a great idea. Why haven't Chrysler, Ford, and GM done that using > this kind of idea? > > -Greg > _______________________________________________ > Asterisk-Biz mailing list > [email protected] > http://lists.digium.com/mailman/listinfo/asterisk-biz -- Kenneth Shaw Director of Technology ExpiTrans, Inc. 2428 Newport Blvd #8 Costa Mesa, CA 92627 tel: 949 278 7288 fax: 866 494 5043 [EMAIL PROTECTED] _______________________________________________ Asterisk-Biz mailing list [email protected] http://lists.digium.com/mailman/listinfo/asterisk-biz
