TeleBlend Restores Service

Finally! TeleBlend has got service back up for customer Marc Kruskol, who I would say was one of the maddest TeleBlend or SunRocket customers I have heard from. Kruskil says his outage lasted from last Monday, August 6 until approximately 2:30pm PDT Aug. 14. The problem, I am pretty sure, has to do with termination partners in the Van Nuys area who either took some time to come to identify and strike business deals with TeleBlend, and then to get all the portability and software issues ironed out. Nice to hear that Kruskol now can use his VoIP service.

Yesterday, customer Fred O. Pitts reported that he still didn't have service. "I am now eight days and counting without incoming service." Pitts now says (Aug. 14) that his service still hasn't been restored. That's disappointing. Make it nine days.

Yoomba Hits 500,000 Users

Yoomba Ltd. says it now has 500,000 uses since officially launching about a month ago.

Yoomba’s peer-to-peer application sits on top of every email network and turns any email address into a phone or instant messenger. Once Yoomba is activated buttons appear inside a user’s chosen email application, providing one-click access to talk to friends, family or colleagues around the world and on any network for free.

It works, though users may notice some slowdown of their email client. That, at least, is what seems to happen when Yoomba runs over Microsoft Office.

Free Phone For Reseller Partners

All resellers who sign up for the Flat Planet Phone Company yearly $199 Reseller program will receive a free Cisco Linksys SPA942 phone and a $200 rebate on purchases of IP telephony equipment from VoIP Supply, says Moshe Maeir, Flat Planet Phone Company CEO.

FPPC offers resellers a brandable, SIP-based platform supporting hosted PBX service, voice mail and fax-to-email features, call recording, calling cards, disposable numbers, Iotum integration, local international phone numbers, reduced roaming expenses, virtual IVRs and click to call.

FPPC resellers are supported by an integrated rating and billing engine, customer self care portal capabilities and full customization of offered features.

Are Landlines Becoming a Giffen Good?

Widespread use of VoIP tends to cause voice prices to fall. And classical economic theory would suggest that consumption of wireline calling should increase, as a result. In some cases that seems to be what happens. People call globally more often when the prices are lower.

But it just is possible,under some specific circumstances,for price declines to cause reduced consumption.

A Giffen good, for example, is an “inferior” good for which a rise in its price makes people buy even more of the product as its price rises. Conversely, there is less demand as price falls. To be sure, such Giffen goods are exceedingly rare. But one is tempted, when looking a mobile versus fixed line calling, to ask whether there are not some similarities.

Mobile calling now leads wired connections by a three-to-one margin globally and more people are shifting to "wireless only" calling. And though it is a loose analogy, perhaps we might think of mobile calling as a "superior" product and wireline calling as an "inferior" good, not in terms of intrinsic worth but in terms of the way people consume each product.

Giffen goods are named after Sir Robert Giffen, who was attributed as the author of this idea by Alfred Marshall in his book Principles of Economics. The classic example of potato consumption during a famine now is viewed as unsupported.

But in July, Robert T. Jensen, an economist at Brown University, and Nolan H. Miller, a professor of public policy at Harvard University, published an article for the National Bureau of Economic Research on Giffen goods.

The two economists say they have located a real-world Giffen good, namely rice and wheat flour in the central Hunan and Gansu provinces of China.

As Giffen suggested more than 100 years ago, goods whose price and demand move in the same direction are most likely to be essential products such as food on which households spend a large part of their incomes (and that's why neither VoIP nor landline voice service can be called Giffen goods in a formal sense).

Wheat flour and rice fit the bill in central China. When the price of the good falls, households appear to shift buying to meat. So lower prices cause less consumption.

Jensen and Miller look at poor Chinese consumers and demonstrate that they consume more rice or noodles, their staples, as prices go up.

Still, neither VoIP nor landlines strictly meet the criteria for consideration as Giffen goods. But it is an interesting notion. Might lower landline calling prices caused by VoIP actually lead to lower usage, in the presence of mobile alternatives that might be likened to “superior” goods, as compared to landline which might be thought of as an “inferior” good?

If so, lower landline calling prices will simply hasten the transition to more preferred mobile calling. I wouldn't push the loose analogy too far. But there some parallels.

As the chart suggests, consumers can buy either commodity Y or commodity X (line MN,where M = total available income divided by the price of commodity Y, and N = total available income divided by the price of commodity X).

The line MN is the consumer's budget constraint.

If there is a drop in the price of commodity X, the reduced price will alter relative prices in favour of commodity X, known as the substitution effect. This is illustrated by a movement down the indifference curve from point A to point B.

At the same time, the price reduction causes the consumers' purchasing power to increase, the income effect (line MP where P = income divided by the new price of commodity X).

The substitution effect (point A to point B) raises the quantity demanded of commodity X from Xa to Xb while the income effect lowers the quantity demanded from Xb to Xc.

The net effect is a reduction in quantity demanded from Xa to Xc making commodity X a Giffen good by definition.

Verizon FiOS Blows Away Competition

A recent survey of ComputerWorld readers has Verizon's FiOS service topping the satisfaction rankings in virtually every measured category. Overall, 96 percent of FiOS customers rated the service "excellent" or "good." And though cable modem services scored better than Digital Subscriber Line overall, Comcast fared poorly as a provider. All that noted, and for all the grumbling one tends to see on blogs and discussion boards, about three quarters of the respondents think their services are "excellent" or "good." Upload speed remains the single biggest gripe.

GooglePack Adds StarOffice

GooglePack has added Sun's Web-based productivity suite StarOffice. I don't see any icon for Google Docs & Spreadsheets in the Pack any more, so apparently Google has decided that the more robust StarOffice functionality warrants the switch. I suppose I would have to agree about that. If you are a heavy Microsoft Office user, StarOffice arguably will operate more along the lines of what you are used to, feature-wise. It's the small things, in many cases. The big thing is the presentation tool in StarOffice that wasn't part of Google Docs & Spreadsheets.

Microsoft Vs. Cisco

For an unfortunately old telecom sort of guy, it really is something to watch the coming battle Cisco and Microsoft will be waging over voice services. If you've been around long enough, it seems discomforting that the key battles are not to be waged between Nortel and Lucent, or Avaya and Nortel.

In fact, it also is discomfiting that the coming battle won't even really be about voice per se. Instead, everything now hinges on capabilities in the unified communications or collaboration areas. Communications requires dumb pipes of high quality, to be sure. Beyond that, most of the heavy lifting now can be done by the applications.

So in some genuine sense, the whole global telecom business is about dumb pipes. Not completely, but largely.

Still, voice and real time communications remain challenging disciplines, though that generally is under appreciated by most people.

Microsoft probably is going to discover that, as Cisco has.