All through the nineties, and especially during the dot-com silliness, hundreds if not thousands of companies talked about the "killer app." Usually those who claimed they had it were making some thinly veiled sales pitch for some proprietary piece of software that they believed would make them kings of the world.
I argued, at the time, that the killer app was email, and I still think I was right. Email is one of two things that virtually everyone does online. The other is search, and of course, the founders of Google, if not kings of the world, are now insanely rich.
But Google was never designed to be the killer app; no one was sure where search tools were going to go; they just happened. Alta Vista, the first search tool that tried to index the Web, was really started in large part to show off the power of DEC's processors, which weren't doing well in the marketplace. Alta Vista's early lead was squandered and DEC was bought out by Compaq, which killed the once powerful company, and Compaq was bought by HP. Ho hum.
Broadband connectivity has largely escaped the killer app disease, but in an odd kind of way. The broadband giants (i.e. telcos and cable companies) have pretty much failed to recognize that broadband is not that interesting unless you can do something with it. The big connectivity companies of the dot-com era (e.g. Global Crossing, UUNet, etc.) all collapsed because they utterly ignored the very sensible question, "What will people do with the bandwidth?" Consolidation in the cable business has been driven in large part by the enormous debt wracked up by cable companies trying to get broadband marketshare in advance of having even the slightest idea what people would do with it.
The killer app for broadband is going to be Voice over IP, or in simpler terms, telephone calls. We're already at a point where you can pretty much buy WORLDWIDE flat rate calling for under $40/month. Free point to point telephony software drives that cost down to zero.
We ought to stop calling the phone companies, well, phone companies. They aren't anymore, whether they like it or not. They have no choice but to become broadband companies, and just one of numerous services they offer happens to be dialtone.
In his remarks to the Voice on the Net conference in Boston on October 19th, FCC Chairman Michael Powell has called VoIP a "revolution." Powell went on to call for "bare DSL" access, meaning you can buy DSL service without being forced to buy bundled telephone service.
He went on to say something even more remarkable by outlining what he calls the Internet Consumer Freedoms:
The Consumer Freedoms that Powell outlines are breathtakingly simple yet incredibly important. They underscore the need for communities and organizations to have a competitive marketplace for broadband services--monopoly providers have no incentive to meet Powell's requirements.
It is exciting that Powell has laid this out so plainly. What's going on? Well, another part of his remarks calls for exclusive Federal regulation of Voice over IP. If the alternative is a mish mash of fifty different sets of state rules that are likely heavily influenced by corporate contributions, that may be the right direction, as long as Federal regulation is as light as possible. It appears Powell understands this.
download Michael Powell VoIP remarks).
-->