Truck Roll 2.0

By Carl Ford

VoIP's image is so goofy that I think the Elephant Man would feel sympathy for this misunderstood waif of technology.

Consider the Connecticut PUC that wants VoIP services to report on their truck roll response time to customers. Will a service like Packet8 or Vonage have to provide the routing numbers and screen scrape "Brown's" tracking portal?

Worst of all, the premise of this being a Quality of Service discussion starts in the wrong place. If I want to talk about customer satisfaction, do I ask them to talk about their issues with the experience, or their frustration waiting for the local field technician? Does Best Buy's Geek Squad need to be involved in these discussions?

In California the VoIP folks are being assigned access-like charges, which means the customer has to pay twice the amount of taxes for an ability to save money and bypass the monopoly. And of course, Nebraska is looking for Interconnect VoIP service providers to pay into their local USF fund.

And the problem with all these rules is it does nothing to change the status quo.  It just wants what will be (VoIP), to pay for what will go away (landline services).

In Europe, a good friend was telling me of a conversation he was having with his regulator in which the regulator said that IMS would not solve any of the open issues and customers would be better off with GoogleTalk.

The regulator understands that Voice 2.0 does not mean Truck roll 2.0 will come along for the ride. We can hopefully make the distinction one regulator at a time that access and service are not the same thing anymore, and therefore we should stop treating them as equivalents.

Now fortunately, the people advising Obama are well aware of these issues and will hopefully bring a better understanding of how to bring in the new without it requiring it to look like the old. I am not sure everyone who is working on the team has my same perspective. Sue Ness has been working on ICANN and many are talking about an ICANN for White Spaces, which does not appeal to me personally. I would love for us to embrace IPV6 once and for all and make it part of the plan.

Other former Clinton administration commission members loved the work they did with the USF, and I have advocated that expanding the E-Rate education to support better connectivity in communities for continuing education would be well worth our while. Educations and libraries have been getting the lion share, but there is very little evidence to show that it has done anything other than maintain the status quo. Now if library cards and student IDs were attached to access rights for some Wireless internet technology that promoted better access to local services, we could have a real productivity boost.

I have shared Freedom2speak's website (see http://www.freedom2speak.org) with the hope that people will take a look at all the ways VoIP can be integrated and used that have nothing to do with replacing a black phone. Seeing VoIP this way will be like being hit by a truck.