Guest post by Lee Dryburgh, University College London.

A couple of weeks ago I slumped into my office chair with fairly depressed thoughts in relation to telecoms. I had been startled as a kid by wide area communications, in particular telephony. With a cheap handset I could transcend space seemingly to anywhere on Earth by dialling a digit string. It was with no surprise that upon university graduation (computer science) I began working in telecoms (writing SS7/C7 protocol decodes). Since then I have been fairly well remunerated by every major telecoms vendor (with the exception of Ericsson) and by a string of operators, both cellular and fixed line around the world for my technical services. Not only has the income been good but I have had the opportunity to work at the cutting edge of technology for the best part of my work life. It was with this in mind that I sat depressed with the thoughts of telephony becoming a freebie application like email; the resulting drop in operators and their respective vendors, the subsequent drop in demand for people like me and the lustre drop surrounding telephony. I had only just began to wonder if there was some hope in terms of maintaining a good financial lifestyle in telecoms and whether something would keep up the lustre when my Skype client began to ring.

I answered and it was an eight year old kid I did not know. He talked at me about Skype, Teamspeak, chipping Sony PS2s, P2P sharing for obtaining games and so on. I waited for social graces such as informing me who he was and why he was calling me as I was not even in Skype-Me mode. This did not come. So I asked if his father maybe wanted me and he seemed confused at my question. He got further confused by my questioning to obtain his motive for calling me. I eventually got his message though – he was calling because he can and this is now normal.

Fast forward to today. I was sitting in a lecture at the University as part of the requirement for my engineering doctorate in telecoms. The lecture was meant to be on telecommunications and Internet convergence (yawn, this is nearly 2006 not 1999/2000). After repeated ramblings on Class A-C Internet addresses, dial-up Internet discussions using PPP in Windows 95/98, the lecturer moved onto access networks. He had just finished saying that operators would continue to exist since somebody must pay for the infrastructure, in particular the access part when my RSS reader pulled a headline from a few days back claiming Google would be offering free WiFi access in a second city.

Closer to lunch he stated that he did believe that Skype would not be a success because if it pinched operators they would simply block it. This is such nonsense (in free, democratic countries) that it is not even worth my time spitting out chars to disprove. As we came out of class and left the building, there were street teams handing out free Skype handouts – headphones, CD and 30 minutes of breakout calling (Skype-to-PSTN). On returning after lunch I heard a student bring it up with him and I heard some kind of half-hearted mumble that nothing is free. Of course I do not disagree, I just happen to think that the lecturer's position as CTO of a small operator may not pay for his retirement. Operators (particularly outside of the US) are failing to align themselves with the dramatically changing landscape (beyond good apps I know the operators will not deliver, it is a question of ecosystems and dynamically slicing money out of transaction chains).

In the afternoon he stated he thought 3G may win out against WiMax and touted IMS but could not list any applications for it. IMS is pushed as the intelligence (preceding it is IN, which was a telco failure) for the new IP converged multi-service network. It was only yesterday he was rambling about ISDN and then ATM (B-ISDN), failed operator lead converged multi-service networks. This got me depressed again, but maybe another omen will appear tomorrow! Lets see.

Lee Dryburgh is a graduate student at University College London and blogs his adventures in telecommunications technology at MyDoctorate.com.