The allure of fashion

America's Network,  Nov 15, 2004  by Lester Craft

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"If you're a fashion statement, you run the risk of being unfashionable....I hope that instead of being a fashion statement, we move to a point where it's a technology that's understood and that it's ubiquitous across a multiple of things."

VoIP proponent Jeff Pulver could have been talking about almost anything in the realm of telecom or technology--or simply business in general--when he made that statement in a recent interview in the Los Angeles Times. In fact, he was mulling the future of VoIP, and the implied possibility that it could fall victim to over-hyping even as its adoption increases. There is precedent: The financial boom and bust of dot-coms was a case in point, occurring even as the Internet itself was becoming ubiquitous. Telecom has seen more than its share of fashion-related blowups, spurred in turn by deregulation, the fiber-optic frenzy, and the general tech bubble.

Separating fashion from inherently strong fundamentals isn't easy. In each scenario cited above, fashion was onto something--it's just that the path to a new reality turned out to be anything but a straight line.

Today, telecom is confronted again with new technologies and applications that have the potential to lead to prosperity or penury--and perhaps even to both simultaneously.

Front and center in this issue of America's Network is a look at the future of peer-to-peer telephony, an especially powerful (insidious might be a better word) variant of VoIP. Peer-to-peer hypothetically is capable of disintermediating just about everything. To call it "The Sum of All Fears" does not seem too much of a stretch. And yet, as with all disruptive technologies, there is the question of whether the reality lives up to the hype--in this case, whether the ad hoc nature of peer-to-peer can ever be robust enough to scale to a truly fearsome extent.

Another take on fashion appears in this issue's update on the camera phone. Given that the camera phone's adoption rate may well exceed that of any consumer device in history, the key question for our industry is whether new megapixel models will help--or hurt--network revenue streams.

Also in this issue, we assess the future of wireless platforms, in particular the competition between Flash-OFDM (orthogonal frequency division multiplexing) and the more established EV-DO. The debate spans technological suitability, cost advantages and deployment penetration--and appears far from settled.

Which of these new technologies will persevere and become woven into the fabric of our industry? Alternatively, which will turn out to be mere fashion? It's our job to help sort it out.

Lester Craft

Editor-in-Chief

COPYRIGHT 2004 Questex Media Group, Inc.
COPYRIGHT 2008 Gale, Cengage Learning