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Former FCC Chairman Powell: VoIP 'Unassailable'By TED GLANZER
TMCnet Communications and Broadband Columnist
Building on the theme of the personalization revolution in communications technologies, former FCC Chairman Michael Powell said that the virtues of voice-over-IP are “unassailable” because of the many applications that can be created for consumers.
“It’s Legos,” said Powell during his keynote speech at the IT EXPO in Los Angeles. “It gives people a sense of identity …. The hallmark is, is it more powerful and is it less expensive.” Powell’s comments regarding VoIP personalization and openness resonate even further when combined with former Hewlett-Packard CEO Carly Fiorina’s comments yesterday at IT EXPO that all physical processes and analog content will become digital, mobile, virtual and personal.
Powell said that the revolution can be boiled down to the three S’s: software, silicon and storage.
With the tremendous advances in those three fields, Powell said that we have gone from the early 1980s, when he bought his first 10-meg hard disk for $1,582 to the present-day, hand-held iPod, which can store 25,000 photos and 15,000 songs for less than $400.
“It’s a toy,” Powell quipped, mocking exasperation. “That’s all an iPod is: software, silicon and storage.”
That continued evolution is part of the revolution.
“People aren’t supposed to have important stuff,” Powell said. “We have populated the globe with billions of people with really powerful stuff in our hands. Now we’re really talking about the Information Age.”
Powell said that the days of network centralized in institutions and governments have been spun out to the periphery to average people.
“The impact on business and society has been profound,” Powell noted. “All of us have smart devices in our hands.”
Indeed, the revolution has increased the speed of innovation and has changed the notion of what are our markets.
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Ted Glanzer is assistant editor for TMCnet. For more articles by Ted Glanzer, please visit:
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