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God bless us every one.Ĭhristmas is a time for reflection and nostalgia, so let's take a break and relive a great moment in telco history, verbatim and courtesy of a nostalgic Triple Platinum mega-uber value reader: Thanks to all of you for making this the best, and worst, year ever for EuroTelcoblog. I look forward to strolling through a nuclear winter EuroTelcoland in 2006 with you, my dear mega-uber value readers. I still occasionally get hits, sometimes from telcos and handset makers, searching for this - "What is the ARPU potential?" I can imagine them hopefully saying.Īnyway, it was an amazing year to behold and be part of (in my small virtual way), and no doubt 2006 will bring more wonders and horrors. My favorite telco event of the year was actually a fictional one - the arrival of the Wasp T-12 Speech Tool. I've left a lot out, but as telco watchers of the future will no doubt say, if you can remember 2005 you weren't there! Equally hard to believe, but much more serious, was the RBOCs attempt late in the year to crash the hippy love fest (as they would probably term it) which is the open internet.The floorspace occupied by VoIP, IPTV and telco triple play industry events exceeded the total surface area of Canada for the first time in history, and the delegates to these shows, marched side-by-side into the sea, would form a neverending column - these are both facts, and I stand by them.Google scared the hell out of everyone, well me at least.Things turned serious for P2P, and P2P got serious.There was also a lot of wild and wacky newsflow around alternative access technologies.I'm pretty sure this will be as easy as pinning Jello to the wall, but many will try anyway, and the facilitators will get paid and/or acquired. Decentralized and social media exploded this year, and it's difficult to find any company which does not claim to have a strategy for capturing the value created by user-generated content.The vision, if not necessarily the net present value, of voice at the edge of the network was decisively validated - the sheer pace of innovation unleashed around this issue has been nothing short of jaw-dropping.
However, for all the shock and horror, it was a truly amazing year, the likes of which we may not witness again:
If investor attitudes were country music song titles, then this year would be called something like "Take Your Share Buyback and Shove It." Results in Q3 contained some bleak outlook statements regarding the next couple of years, to be followed (of course) by a strong recovery - a special Christmas menu of humble pie followed by jam tomorrow. It will be a death of 453 million cuts, and in 2006 it will move into higher gear.įor our monthly sector product (which I found recently, somewhat to my surprise, that some people actually seem to read) I entitled my end of year piece "Annus horribilis, annus mirabilis," which is precisely how it feels.Īs of the close of play today, EuroTelco has underperformed the STOXX 600 by 21% year-to-date, and is the only sector to have lost money in an otherwise buoyant stock market. Rather, I have argued that if VoIP/IM communities got big enough and interconnected their various closed platforms, the PSTN would be progressively less relevant. In all the years that I have been pestering clients about VoIP/IM, I have never once said that the PSTN would be killed outright as a result. Meanwhile, in Mac-land, Om and Andy have both written on developments around Gizmo (for what it's worth I am seeing a lot of VoIP geeks who have always refused to use Skype turning up on Gizmo). It's also nice to see Skype dragged (undoubtedly kicking and screaming) into this process without the need for the usual niceties. I would only add that Google has the GAIM-master on board, so clearly the company itself will undoubtedly also have something exciting in the works beyond the AIM deal. A mega-uber value reader pointed me towards this big announcement yesterday, and I was just starting to post on it when I realized that Thomas has already done a great job with it. Blessed be the third party interoperability geeks.