Today, I catched up with my blogroll (which I lag very behind due to spending all my free time on the bayesian plugin), and was kind of surprise to see this on ITU Newsblog.

Public IP telephony would create a wide open door for new competitors to walk in and take away all the value that the carriers can bring to voice services. In theory, someone having a phone with an Ethernet socket needs only a high-quality IP service and a server to provide IP address to be able to use the phone to place unlimited calls to any other phone. The internet backbones are already in place and, since voice uses very little bandwidth, the industry would move to flat rate pricing: “All the calls you want to make for only US$9.99 a month!”

Wow, ITU actually got it half right!

What they should do is take this to the next obvious development, that it cost less then US$200 to setup your own VoIP server + handset (and getting cheaper) and soon people will be asking “Why are we even paying US$9.99 a month when we can just do it ourselves?”

I think the concept of the telco or what we called “a voice company” may not even exist in the future.