Hindsight is such a wonderful thing. While rummaging through a load of old files I came across a set of predictions, issued by wireless unleashed, as to possible business models for VOIP. It’s obvious that the VOIP market is getting crowded and that players operate from similar set of assumptions, leading to equally similar business models. The interesting bit in wireless unleashed’s four scenarios is the business models they describe. They mention four, each imaginatively named:
Telcotopia (the incumbent’s “official” future); Utilitiyability (the utilities industry uses its infrastructure to deliver connectivity); HeLLL with three L’s (lobbying, legislation and litigation ensures the stranglehold of the operators). The fourth scenario is mentioned almost as an afterthought: Community Owned networks. Wireless unleashed describes a situation analogous to how car ownership works:
Clearly, the customer/end-user/network owner would not need to acquire all skills necessary to build and run a network, any more than an automobile owner builds and fixes her own automobile. The construction and maintenance of the network could be outsourced to engineering and operation firms where it makes sense to do so; by analogy, we own our own car even though it is manufactured by a car builder and repaired by a mechanic when it breaks. But the customer-owner-end user would make the major decisions, finance the initiatives that affect the network, and contract for maintenance and upgrades.
They point out there could be other ownership models, for instance, one where groups of consumers own the network, as is happening now with groups of condominium owners who collectively own a fibre-optic network. But it is also conceivable that each end user is also an owner of the network. This is where the “fat” home network touches the “fat” internet backbone, by-passing the skinny “access” factor that now bars people from fully accessing services. Wireless unleashed sees a number of conditions that need to be fullfilled for Customer Owned Networks to be a viable alternative, and I think that now, in 2007, we can check off each of their conditions:
- Access to the network must become easier to configure – check
- Third party network construction companies must appear – check (but differently from how WU imagined it)
- The regulatory climate determining right of way must improve – (check, but also differently from how WU imagined it)
The promise of mobile-voip communications, set up in a way so that WiFi access points can form an individuall owned “resource” to be shared collectively amongst a group of users brings the Customer Owned Network scenario within reach. Looking at it another way: customers who sniff wifi access point and then share them to provide a mobile VOIP infrastructure make the network customer built, not just customer owned. We now live in an era where more and more online networks are forming into large collectives of consumers. Content (even paid for content) is now collectively manufactured, marketed and sold. It is a matter of time before this collective intelligence spreads to the domain of the mobile operators. Wifi and VOIP enabled mobile hardware will open the door for this.
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