Voice over IP real value for money

WE'VE BEEN hearing from Taylor Reynolds this morning, who has been analysing the policy trends in broadband growth from his perspective as a member of the International Telecommunications Union.

The ITU is a standards and policy body that looks into such things as the future of connectivity, emerging markets and the standards that will define them. ADSL is an ITU standard, as is the h.323 compression technology.

Reynolds gave us some interesting facts and figures on broadband worldwide. 60% of all broadband is phone-line based right now, with 35% cable. Asia has a 42% penetration rate, with some countries - such as Korea - hitting 80% of their population.

There was some interesting information about pricing to be had. Whilst China has the cheapest broadband in the world, at just $9 for a 512k connection, it was relatively expensive as a percentage of a Chinese citizen's income. Surely the best value for money was Japan, which provides a 47Mb connection to homes in some parts for just $25.

As broadband saturation increases, Reynolds suggests that bundled services will become more important. He pointed to YahooBB in Japan as an example: VoIP phone calls are 1/10th the cost of calls via local phone operator NTT and he said that this provided a real incentive for customers in Japan to use Yahoo. He also referred to Hanaro Telecom in Korea: any subscriber can have a Hanaro PC technician come to their house to fix their PC, regardless of what the problem concerns.

In the regulatory sphere, he expressed both anticipation and apprehension at the next phase of communications convergence. In the future according to the ITU, there will be a paradigm shift from customers paying for individual networks to services which will be network independent, as one IP platform supports everything. From a regulatory standpoint, how to decide the structure for that - one provider owning fixed and wireless v partnerships v common IDs across multiple providers - was providing them with a lot of headaches. µ