Acknowledgement to Mathew Ingram for the post that brought my attention to Heather's post through the Comments.

Telus - a legacy Canadian telco in transition: Jon Arnold has posted some numbers provided at the Telus President's Symposium held last Thursday in Toronto. Telus is the primary (and legacy) telco in Alberta and British Columbia and has a very successful national mobile network in Telus Mobility. They have a reputation for rapidly introducing new technology -- they were the first to have an EV-DO offering in major Canadian metropolitan markets; also they went through a strike last summer that was essentially about transitioning labor costs to a level consistent with a Voice 2.0 business model. Telus has continued to be profitable; their stock price has risen over fivefold since mid-2003.

This is the picture of a telco successfully transitioning to a Voice 2.0 model reflecting the value is in applications (as opposed to access and directory) where:

• Talk is the baseline through provision of connectivity and directory services, yet
• The meter is going off -- as evidenced by their reduced long distance activity and the reduced reliability on voice for revenues.
• Applications (as evidenced by their increasing reliance on Data and Wireless) are becoming the value creators.