* Prominent industry veteran predicts PSTN shakeup
The U.S. incumbent local exchange carriers are in “mortal peril,” said networking veteran John McQuillan at the Next-Generation Networks conference early this month in Boston.
The reason? Voice over IP (VoIP) threatens the ILECs’ very business, technology and policy foundations, he said.
“VoIP… undercuts everything they have ever done in terms of technology and policy,” McQuillan stated in a summary session at NGN on Nov. 6, during which he also announced his retirement from the networking business after a prominent 30-year career. McQuillan co-founded NGN 16 years ago.
“There is now a growing recognition that voice is another application. But the idea behind ‘The Phone Company’ was to build a whole network for this one application,” he said. If voice becomes just an add-on to a laptop, TV, or other device, he observed, all-purpose IP networks will become the norm.
“This presents a tremendous regulatory challenge. I have no idea what our government will do when they realize that all networks do everything,” McQuillan said. “This will pose challenges to public policy and universal service.”
Wondered McQuillan, “Do people have inherent rights to broadband or a browser? And who ‘owns’ your phone call? If you are unhappy [with network service], who are you unhappy with?”
Even as the NGN event was in full swing, the Federal Communications Commission announced plans to open a public forum Dec. 1 about how or if to regulate Internet phone calls. The FCC intends to then issue a set of proposals on how to migrate telephone services to IP-based networks. After the agency reviews comments, it will issue a new set of regulations, perhaps by late next year.
Peer-to-peer VoIP shakes up the traditional telephony service model. McQuillan and NGN conference co-chair Dave Passmore, who is also research director at The Burton Group, pointed to the recently announced Skype, for example, a P2P telephony app that encrypts voice sessions and works with firewalls, network address translation and routers.
One open question is how VoIP applications that reside on user client devices and do not go through some central server can even be identified and regulated.
For their part, ILECs SBC and Qwest participated in a panel in which they affirmed that they are moving to VoIP services over residential broadband circuits. However, they didn’t reveal much about the timing of these services.
McQuillan predicts a “slow meltdown” of the U.S. PSTN, asserting, “We can’t really expect a smooth transition to a public broadband network.”
