Not to Minimize Broadband, But...

New at&t CEO Randall Stephenson views wireless as the growth driver for the next three to five years. "The conversation about winning the race for consumers' homes starts and ends with wireless," he says.

Here's a Metric

Blogger Don Dodge (on The Next Big Thing)cites a statistic provided by David Skok, a venture capitalist with Matrix Partners. On average about three percent of all open source software users pay for a support contract, and most of them are business users, as you would guess.

Since the three percent paying for maintenance, support, training, and consulting will spread their buying across the entire ecosystem of providers, it is obvious that high volume adoption is needed to support many such companies. In the mass market, it is a surer route to sell hardware or software add-ons.

The conversion or "upsell" rate would strike many in the direct mail business as "par for the course. Conversion rates for targeted mass mailings, even when one has the right audience, the right product and the right timing, tend to hover in the three percent range.

Structural Separation?

New Zealand Telecom is in the midst of discussions with regulators about breaking itself up into three distinct companies: retail, wholesale and networks. In India, wireless carriers are setting up an independent infrastructure company so two different service providers can concentrate on selling. BT, obviously, has taken the structural separation route. And here in the United States, the old Rochester Telephone Co. agreed to structural separation in exchange for more freedom to operate unregulated lines of business.

While there have been calls for structural separation as a way of enhancing local loop competition, the success of such a policy hinges on the cooperation and willingness of the asset owner to go along. No such cooperation is likely on the part of major U.S. carriers.

The point is that we might agree or disagree about the merits of structural separation as a way of spurring more competition and goodness in communications services, but it simply cannot occur without the cooperation of the asset owners. The idea will resurface again. It always does.

Google Gears

At its developer conference, Google announced Google Gears, an open source technology for creating offline web applications. The new browser extension extends use of Web-based online applications into an offline mode. As an example. the Google Reader now allows offline reading of the top 2,000 items. Very cool.

Google also is gearing up to support creation of a single, open source way of enabling access to email and online calendars, for example, without access to the Web. Google Gears obviously also will allow developers to embed indexing and search functions into other applications.

Google Gears is another step towards making Web-based applications respond just about as well as offline, hard-disk-drive-based applications.

Nothing Stays the Same...

Alec Saunders, Iotum CEO, says "Skype hasn’t lost relevance for me. It just doesn’t work." Saunders had to uninstall the application because of some unpleasant interactions with his PC, he reports. He says he had similar issues with Gizmo and so now uses GoogleTalk or Jajah.

Likewise, Saunders notes that blogger Ken Camp points out that fewer people are using Skype today than a few months ago. It's almost an embarassment of riches. "There are now so many options for quality cheap calls that Skype isn't as exciting as it was when it first hit the market a few years ago," says Saunders.

Come to think of it, though I don't know I've had the technical issues Alec reports, Jajah has come up and Skype gets very little use of late. I also got pinged by MobiVox to remind me I haven't used Skype on my mobile, either. Nor have I been making use of my video email client, either.

Perhaps the point is that it is terribly difficult for any new feature or application to really punch through all the clutter and user interface issues one faces in a busy life. Even useful and low price tools have to contend with lots of other distractions.

Jajah gets DT

In the VoIP world, this has to count as a pretty big deal Deutsche Telekom is backing Web-enabled VoIP service Jajah, says Reuters reporter Eric Auchard. In a real sense, DT is backing a dial-around service that when used cuts DT's long distance revenue, especially higher-margin international calling.

Deutsche Telekom is embedding Jajah into its T-Online Web properties and that it expects to offer calling services to consumers and businesses in the future.

And T-Online Ventures, Telekom's venture capital unit, disclosed it is part of a third round of funding for Jajah. Intel Corp. recently invested in a $20 million investment round and has granted Jajah use of some of Intel's key VoIP patents.

Jajah is one of a new class of rivals that let callers simply call phone-to-phone, once they have signed up on the Web. Jangl, Jaxtr and Rebtel also use the Web-enabled approach or dial-around approaches.

What all these firms offer is a way to use VoIP to make cheaper calls on standard POTS phones. And any way one looks at the matter, that is going to be most of the market, most of the time.

Jajah has signed up more than twi million users and expects well over five million users by year-end. Germany is one of Jajah's five biggest markets after the United States and Britain. Other top markets are China and India, he said.

This is Helpful...

Verizon Wireless Data Service (EVDO)no longer forbids use of the access for VoIP. That's helpful. My provider (at&t) does not allow the use of its broadband service for VoIP.

That's helpful for would-be third party developers and for Verizon itself. No dominant service provider, no matter how well endowed and resourceful, ever will be able to develop its own walled garden offerings in great enough abundance to satisfy businesses and consumers who will want to buy new services and features.