Jon Arnold subbed for me today, interviewing Jazinga co-founder Shidan Gouran. Jazinga’s combination WiFi router / PBX promises to be one of the more revolutionary SMB telephony devices to hit the market in years.
No doubt there’s a lot of interest in the product. 22 people joined the call including Larry Greenfield, Steve Lecomte, Dan York, Arshad Merali, Carl Ford, Jim Courtney, Moshe Maeir, Jeb Brilliant, Ian Hood, Bill Volk, James Body, Frank Abrams, Cliff Flood, Nabeel Jafferali and Adam Austin.
In Telerupted: Twilight for Telephone Networks, Daniel Berninger projects that at some point VoIP networks will connect more individuals than the PSTN, and then asks what might happen to current minutes based VoIP businesses. These businesses depend on charging for access to the VoIP network via the PSTN or vice versa. Moreover, the artificial constraints that this dependency imposes are real and substantial. Daniel writes:
Companies that depend on the telephone network inherit of a range of artificial constraints. VoIP devices connected via the telephone network lose the prospect of delivering high-quality audio. Traditional telephones do not support the use of domain names for routing or hyperlinking. Global flat-rate termination that serves as a driving force for applications of the Internet get sacrificed. Embracing the telephone network postpones the search for new forms of communication.
We live in interesting times in the telecom industry. Recently, I saw a presentation from a VoIP telco showing a great growth curve for a number of quarters followed by a flat period. After multiple quarters it suggested that in some markets mere POTS replacement has reached the point of saturation. Now this service provider, like the incumbents, is out looking for value added services to add to its portfolio.
Disruptive pricing can only disrupt for so long, it seems. At some point, that advantage can be erased, returning the basis of competition to service, products and features.
Image via Wikipedia You may recall a few weeks ago that JAJAH announced that they had won Yahoo’s call termination business. Essentially, Yahoo outsourced their network to JAJAH. That’s a great deal for JAJAH. This morning they’ve done it again, announcing a relationship with Michael Robertson‘s Gizmo5. In essence, Gizmo5 will do the same deal [...]
