Bob Frankston, commenting on how telcos want to shift entirely off copper to fiber so they don’t have to share and so they can allocate 99% of the resulting bandwidth to video and voice and 1% to the Internet, hits on an important point:

The real impact has come more from the 24×7 connectivity than the speed. It is this persistent connectivity that has made VoIP both important and not very interesting. Kids playing Xbox-live with friends around the world are not making phone calls – they going beyond the conceptual model of telephony. By treating the Internet as a service rather than fundamental and vital connectivity, we cannot use it as the basis for new services such as medical monitoring and emergency communications. The tragedy is that the resilient Internet is far better for emergency services than E911 could possibly be even if it weren’t locked into legacy rules.

Why Settle for Just 1%? by Bob Frankston, www.frankston.com

As long as we have all major carriers and their oversight body (the FCC) thinking in terms of voice, video, and Internet as discrete and separate services, instead of thinking of the Internet as fundamental connectivity for everything, we’ll continue to miss out on opportunities for services well beyond triple.

-jsq