Art Hitomi bought an Nextel i1000 today. One of
the features that I was skeptical about until I got
home and found the ad stuffed in my mailbox was that
it supplies a 2-way radio good for most of souther California.
Similar to how instant messaging combined the
timeliness of of chat with the usefulness of text
and routing, radio has the potential to provide most
of what we use phones for, but at a fraction of the
cost.
Imagine a phone conversation where only one person
was allowed to speak at a tiem. Is that a restriction
you could live with in some situations? Now imagine
that you only are charged for the on air time
that you actually speak. Imagine also that the time
you speak can be compressed and delay sent and
instanly received and de-compressed. All of
a suddent you have a near-free communication mechanism without
having to pay for the luxury of speaking and interrupting someone.
This seems to work for most cases of communication (I assume
with the exception of phone sex). Now, imagine a
conference call where the voice gets multi-casted
to all listening participants.
I think that the economics of telephone communications
is going to change radically. The process went from
focusing on the phone, to selling the service and giving
away the phone, and now to absolute billing. I am
starting to see the benefit to the consumer for
per-packet billing.
Greg