Originally published June 29, 2009

Telephony vs. Cacophony

In my last post‚ I wrote about overhearing some folks talking about how voice telecom has become passé. Their basic point… why bother to dial someone in your company when you can IM them? So I started thinking about how much of a pain in the neck IM and SMS really are when I have contacts scattered about on Yahoo‚ Skype‚ AIM‚ Windows Live‚ etc. I run IM IDs on my box almost all the time to accommodate my friends‚ colleagues and customers. I’ve managed to keep some of them the same across networks‚ and Trillian certainly helps. But we have "standards" at work and I have a "persona I maintain outside the office. So in the heat of the moment and the rush of the day‚ things can get very interesting when you accidentally click on the wrong contact‚ type something a little too quickly or that email auto-fills the incorrect address. And who isn’t thrilled to get that IM or Tweet to remind you to check a recently deposited voicemail or email?

I’ve been in telecom a long‚ long time. This train of thought led to memories of those ads in Telephony Magazine circa 1975 that showed the masses of phone lines and wires that appeared a couple of decades after Alexander made that first call to Mr. Watson. As you old timers will no doubt remember‚ there were separate dial-tone providers and networks and no mechanism to go between them. So they each strung their own wires, and if you really wanted to speak with your Aunt Bertha‚ on Scott Rice Telecom‚ and you had already installed Frontier‚ you had to put in a second phone and a new connection to your home!

So here we are again – multiple networks‚ multiple IDs‚ multiple devices‚ multiple personalities. Something of a zoo me thinks. Better? Sure! But I have to believe that what happened 100 years ago is bound to repeat. Google’s on the path with its Google Voice service. Perhaps SIP is the mechanism that will make it all possible. What can be done for chat? Who knows?

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Mike Burke

http://www.iq-services.com/
6601 Lyndale Ave South‚ #330
Minneapolis‚ MN 55423

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