2008 Forecast: The Age of Disruptive Telephony Has Arrived

2008 has the potential to be a landmark year for ‘”disruptive telephony”, a term used by Dan York and others to describe the impact of convergent devices and web 2.0-style application mash-ups on the telecommunications industry. Key indications of this trend can be found on the following fronts:

Application Development

Last year O’Reilly Media and StrikeIron held the first Telephony Mash-up Contest. The contest provided “a stage for developers to demonstrate their creative skills using emerging telephony technologies such as PBX, IVR, and Web Service APIs”. This year Google is awarding up to $10 million to developers in order to kick start the new Android platform, and Nokia continues to hold its annual Mobile Rules competition for business plans and applications in the mobile environment. Meanwhile Microsoft’s Tellme has released the beta version of its mobile application which combines voice search and text results, and some very interesting startups based on telephony mash-ups have emerged recently - GrandCentral (now Google), Jott, Twango, SoonR, and Ribbit - to name just a few.

Networks

Open access to wireless spectrum will soon be made available to a much greater variety of applications, devices and developers. This is taking the form of an auction for 700 MHz spectrum taking place early this year, and the bidders include Google, AT&T, Chevron USA, Cox Wireless, and Microsoft founder Paul Allen’s Vulcan Spectrum. Verizon pulled a sudden policy u-turn recently by announcing its open access plan allowing its “customers to connect any device that meets [Verizon's] minimum technical standards, and be activated on [its] network”. As with Google�s Android and Nokia�s S60 developer programs, Verizon is taking steps to foster wireless innovation by releasing its CDMA network standards and opening the program up to all third party developers who meet its basic certification requirements.

Devices

The iPhone single-handedly shattered the myth that cellphones must be inherently difficult to use. Love it or hate it, Apple has created a new benchmark for mobile user experience. After a considerable amount of pressure Apple has finally agreed to open up its platform to third-party development and it will be interesting to see what emerges given the multitude of “unauthorized apps” that have already appeared.

Until recently carriers seemed to represent an almost insurmountable obstacle to the kind of innovation that characterized the growth of the web. There are signs that this is changing - whether through entrepreneurial work-arounds or policy conversions within the telecommunications industry. Stay tuned…