Red Pill Telecom

T-Mobile USA Gets Into The VOIP Telephony Business

Brier Dudley of the Seattle Times gives a great overview of T-Mobile USA's plans to essentially recreate the Vonage business model with its brand new Talk Forever Home Phone.

T-Mobile provides you with a router with an analog phone jack - an Analog Telephone Adapter (ATA) that connects to your home's Broadband Internet Access.

What's interesting is that it's $10/month as long as you have a (mobile) T-Mobile service plan of at least $39/month.

Welcome to Red Pill Telecom

(1 update - see below)

This is a weblog of unconventional wisdom about about the (all-too-) slowly-dying Telecom industry... generally based around the Telephony industry, and its technologies, of the previous century, and those death-of-a-thousand-cuts technologies, systems, and companies that are replacing the Telecom industry of the previous century. (Image courtesy of University of Texas at Arlington.)

If you aren't aware of the name reference of this weblog, here's the text of the dialog of the relevant scene from the movie The Matrix. I think the reference is more than apt. The Telecom industry of the previous century is desperately handing out Blue Pills and hoping their services, technologies, and business practices continue to be perceived as relevant and needed... but the truth is, increasingly, they aren't.

The original inspiration for the name of RPT was a brief reference by Martin Geddes in his must-read weblog Telepocalypse. As it turns out, Martin and I attended that first Freedom To Connect conference. I had an ephiphany at Freedom To Connect; I realized that the vast majority of those who've spent any considerable time involved in the Telecom industry of the previous century not only do not get it about the Telecom industy of this century, they cannot get it! Simply, they cannot unlearn the paradigms of an industry with a century of history and precedent. Once I understood that, a lot of what I heard from individuals at Freedom To Connect made a lot more sense - I could natter on for hours or days about the advantages of Broadband Wireless Internet Access, and because they could not fit it into their paradigm derived from the Telecom industry of the last century, what I was saying was just noise to them.