Economics of SIP

I found this article over at GigaOm interesting. The article argues that Skype's "Global Index" technology is much cheaper than SIP, which is a significant factor in its (i.e., Skype's) success. I only wish they had provided real numbers. I wonder if anyone has done a careful cost analysis of VoIP signalling?

The principle of "good enough" and telecom networks

This article at the PFF website caught my attention. In the article, Adam Thierer, in reflecting on the recent Gmail outage, applies the ideas of this article from Wired to telecom. The telecom network has been engineered (at high cost) to 99.999% (i.e., "five nines") reliability; the question is whether this quality level is anywhere close to what is demanded by the market.

In some sense, we have a test case in that we are willing to consume different feature sets in telecom at different prices. Wireline telephony is the most reliable with the highest voice quality at price $x, mobile telephony is less reliable and has lower voice quality (with mobility) and is offered at price $y and VoIP has probably less reliability and lower quality than either at a lower price ($z). As a note, I don't think it is fair to say that $z=0 because we do pay for internet access and the computer that runs the VoIP software.

So is there only a marginal demand for quality, which might partially explain why wireline access lines are on the decline? Or is it strictly due to the substitution of mobile for wireline access?

Mobile WiMAX in Europe

This article frames mobile WiMAX as a disruptive technology in the European telecommunications market. The essence of the article is this:

For the past 15 years, American tech giants such as Intel and Microsoft have been largely shut out of the European-dominated mobile phone industry. Not that they haven't tried—Intel (INTC) made processors and memory for handsets and Microsoft (MSFT) is still pushing a pint-sized version of Windows for handheld devices. But the business was still largely controlled by telecom companies such as Nokia, Ericsson, and Vodafone.

Now, with the pending arrival of a disruptive new wireless technology called Mobile WiMAX, the U.S. crowd stands its best chance in years at knocking down Fortress Europe. A kind of Wi-Fi on steroids, Mobile WiMAX delivers data at speeds comparable to conventional third-generation (3G) mobiles but promises to be cheaper to implement because it uses newer, more efficient technology.

Do you think this article is correct? Does WiMAX match the criteria for a disruptive technology laid out by Christiansen in his book?