It’s Time For A Revolution

I attended a service-provider conference at the Boulder, Colo. offices of Polycom (PLCM) last week, and during the discussion period we did some blue-skying: Wouldn’t it be great if there were a nationwide IP-based peering fabric that allowed alternative service providers to bypass the PSTN, in order to offer HD voice and other innovative features?

The “death of the PSTN” meme has been circulating for a while now, and it got an airing from an unexpected source early this year when Verizon chief marketing officer John Stratton, in an off-the-cuff interview at CES with Bloomberg News, went off the reservation. Stratton remarked that his company would likely "do away with" traditional phone lines within seven years.

That revealing statement was quickly repudiated by Verizon, and Stratton was sent off to a re-education camp in Xinjiang Province (just kidding). Nevertheless, Stratton had voiced what many people in the industry already know: The PSTN is going to wither away. It’s just a matter of time.

“The [current] state of affairs is analogous to printing e-mail before it reaches the destination in order to preserve a role for the post office,” wrote Daniel Berninger, CEO of Free World Dialup, in a sharp blog on GigaOm and SimpleSignal, and the leading VoIP application platform provider BroadSoft, we are going to host a “CTO Summit” at the VON Conference & Expo, Sept. 22 in Miami Beach, to hash out a plan to create that new IP-based peering fabric.

“Look, I know we've been talking about this for a long time,” said SimpleSignal CEO Dave Gilbert, “but now is the time for us to start doing something.”

I’ll provide further detail later; suffice it to say here that this is a chance to catalyze a movement that could change the face of the $2 trillion telecom industries. And that’s what VON’s all about. Stay tuned for more, and if you’re interested in attending the VON CTO Summit 2009 please send me an e-mail at rmartin@vpico.com.