Convergence is Real

["Enyeart, Michael J" <>]

Introduction

To get some idea of how many VoIP companies now exist, run a WWW search on “compare voip”.    Some of these companies offer telephone service at an order of magnitude lower cost than many colleges and universities currently charge.  This represents an inflection point for higher education telecom providers. 

 

We may run the risk of being victims of our own telecom culture.  Continuing or extending the status quo may result in significant loss of dial tone business in the near term, perhaps similar to what happened with the student long distance business, or as Yogi Berra said, “This is like deja vu all over again.”¹  In this light, two areas that should be reevaluated are the revenue and technology models. 

 

 

The revenue model

Access to the IP network is commonly subsidized at many colleges and universities.  This subsidy is often partially derived from telephone revenue.  Many users perceive internet access as free.  This provides a powerful economic incentive for customers to pursue alternative (“free”) telephone service.  A solution to this problem is to reform the telecommunication rate structure(s).

 

 

The technology model

A technology review should include both end user and centralized technologies.  Does it make sense to extend the status quo by replacing PBX telephone sets with Ethernet telephone sets, or would it be better to focus on completely integrating the telephone with the computer?  Is there substantial risk of Ethernet telephone sets becoming largely obsolete in a short period of time?  We all know that some users love their telephone sets, but the same was true of typewriters.

 

On the central office side, achieving the new economy of scale, inherent in VoIP, locally may be possible only at the grassroots level—using, for example, open-source software and/or higher education federations. The new economy of scale has moved from a telephone switch providing a few thousand lines within a radius of a few miles to a cluster of processors providing millions of lines without geographic limitation.   As a result, it is possible to buy competitive telephone service with unlimited domestic long distance and in-network international, for a couple of dollars per month, or even obtain it for free, assuming that internet access is regarded as a sunk cost.

 

 

For more information

These are among the issues explored in more depth in an article published in the March/April edition of Educause Review titled Convergence is Real.  http://www.educause.edu/apps/er/erm07/erm072.asp

 

The Integrated Communications Strategies (ICS) group is a component of the Educause Net@Edu initiative.  ICS is actively working on these and other issues of interest to the higher education telecom community.  For more information, or to participate in ICS, please visit http://www.educause.edu/IntegratedCommunicationsStrategies/930

 

 

For further discussion

Please direct your comments and discussion to one of the following forums, and/or reply directly to

 

Respectfully,

Mike Enyeart

Educause Integrated Communications Strategies

 

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¹ http://www.rinkworks.com/said/yogiberra.shtml