4. it's all well and good to say "anyone can open a VOIP company" but
in a country without much competition that doesnt work.
If it doesn't work then you don't need to regulate it. The market will
do it. I think your argument is clearly fallacious and there must be
another reason pushing your agenda.
say i want to open a vonage-type service in the US, i have 2 options. either i
register as a CLEC, or i have a relationship with a CLEC, who treats
me as a large customer. the second option is not viable in israel,
because as a new VOIP entrant you're not going to find a CLEC who will
work with you.
Why not? Just order some PRIs and start working. As I said above, if
it's not profitable, then you don't need to regulate it.
so, we're left with registering as a CLEC, or, in our terms, getting a license.
I suspect that CLECs actually /like/ it that you need to pay a license
and taxes on call termination in order to be a telco - especially if you
make it a legal requirement for international call termination.
It raises entry barriers, which means less competition, which in turn
means more profit. It also means less jobs and less a competitive
economy but I'm not going to give a class on the benefits of free
markets here.
remember also that there's no unbundling here (it's not a big country
and unbundling is not exactly an unqualified success elsewhere), which
makes things kind of different.
I fail to see how. Clearly the "no grey routing" policy is a government
enforced market distortion, in favor of big business and government
taxes and detrimential to small businesses and entrepreneurs.
I think the parrallel with Cuba is quite realistic since grey routing is
illegal there too. Same with India and many developing or still very
regulated countries, really.
As for the size of the country, I think the argument is moot too. EU
policies have forced countries to deregulate their markets, and I am
unaware of small countries (such as belgium) having major issues with
that. If anything, telecoms are booming pretty much in every deregulated
country I can think of - wether it's big or small.
In fact they are also booming in other regulated countries under various
guises / covers. Call centers come to mind.
Personally I am happy to live in a country where the telco have been
(thanks to EU policing) heavily deregulated and that let me the chance
to start a business in this industry and build myself some kind of a
future rather than being unemployed or worse, being a work grunt for a
big company just because I can't afford a license.
as i said before, i'm happy to talk to anyone about these issues, off
list, at any time, i'm in kind of an interesting position as a voip
enthusiast and a regulator, and i think a dialogue between the
regulators and the open-source voip community is a good thing.
Well I think 911 type service is very important and is often seen as a
high barrier of entry. Having a clean and inexpensive way of dealing
with this would be welcome for newcomers in the telco industry.
Cheers,
Jean-Michel.
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