Telecom 2.0

I have just returned from the NMS Communications Connect conference taking place in Madrid, Spain. They did a very good job selecting the speakers and panelists. There were many, including Brough Turner, the CTO of NMS who confirmed my earlier musings of voice (quality) being the killer application of a next generation telephone network. Brough said - and I do agree - better voice could be more pervasive than anything else. Remember - at the moment our conversations utilize the same bandwidth they used to 100 years ago. Finally the industry starts to understand? Good, better late than never...

Community services, Facebook included, and user generated content in general, were the hot topic as well, when the participants finally seem to agree with the Telecosm law of separation of content from conduit. I could hear "we need more content innovation" and while "consumers are smart, not dumb as most of the carriers used to think", the "locked-in users turn into active customer dis-loyalty"... Hey, finally seems like something is on the move...

But absolutely the best presentation of the entire event was delivered by Lee S Dryburgh of ss7.net. He seemed to be the only one understanding the coming changes, the Telecom 2.0. Lee made a couple of interesting observations. Like our life metadata being continuously streamed onto the Internet, taking forms of music preferences (Last.FM), location updates (dopplr.com) or product desires (Amazon wish lists). He also noted the telecoms cannot compete with billions of others in terms of service innovation, strengthening even more the urge of content / conduit separation and how it affects the business models.

Driving around the city earlier today in the November snow I kept on digesting Lee's talk envisioning several further development towards the ultimate vision of Telecom 2.0. Here are the points:

• We will drop the current point - to - point "exclusive conversations" mode. Currently by dialing a number we actually open an exclusive "session" with the other party. This is the throwback of the Bell's technology of two endpoints joined by wire. This is not what we do having face to face (or recently even Internet) conversations... Usually we are in a room with several people or enter a room... and our conversations are not exclusive sessions... we talk to people, but hear the others and can be easily interrupted to resume the thread later on... There is absolutely no reason this will be anything different over the wire (or wireless)... With the advances of the Telecom 2.0 we will have the freedom to be in a virtual room and join other rooms and conduct more life-like non-exclusive conversations.
• Taking above into account, presence and filtering will play the key role. Following the instant messaging model before joining someone for conversation we will have his/ her status available. And what is even more important: our presence statuses will be set separately to different friends and members of the family. It is obvious: while at work, I should generally be available to my coworkers and business partners, seen as busy to the friends, and after hours this will be the opposite.
• And the final form of communications will be sharing your senses with others. Writing letters long time ago we tried to describe what we saw and heard. And this message stripped of all its wealth and compressed into a few words on paper took many days to reach the other party. Then we could describe things around us real time via voice telephone call. Then we started sharing pictures and videos. More and more real time. More and more rich information. Ultimately when I call you, you will be able to see through my own eyes and hear through my own ears...