Tom Evslin of Evslin Consulting keynotes from his seat at the tables arranged in rectangle. He talks about the early days of Voice over IP (VoIP) in 1997. He founded ITXC, recently sold to Teleglobe), to connect the little carriers that were emerging.

The greatest importance of VoIP is in the democratiziation of access to the network, tom says. “VoIP has democratized and lowered the barrier to entry,” he says, pointing to David Isenberg’s classic paper. “There’s no question that VoIP is here.”

He says that he went to Europe recently and instead of paying a buck a minute for phone calls, he brought a headset with him, connected via the broadband offered at all the hotels but one, and made Skype Out calls for pennies. [Here’s an interesting article.]

Tom says that wifi is the next VoIP, an industry/infrastructure ready to take off.

He’s worried about the lobbies arrayed against VoIP. He recommends the VON Coalition as a counter-lobby. He also thinks that, although he’s generally a free market guy, some regulation may be required to ensure that “the last mile monopolies aren’t used to stop the provision of services.” Maybe, he says.

He says that the movement of support jobs to India is a huge success made possible by the low cost of communications. A middle class is growing in India. But not in sub-Saharan Africa. He describes instances where communication has transformed poor villages in Bangladesh. The same model worked in Uganda. [Here’s the model as described in the Grameen Foundational Annual report: “Today there are over 25,000 village phone operators in Bangladesh. “Phone Ladies” earn extra income for themselves (an average of $71 per month, more than twice the average Bangladeshi’s monthly income), while allowing others in the village to conduct business or keep in touch with friends and relatives from a distance.”]

He says he thinks he knows how the industry is going to go. “Think of a box,” he says. It has to be self-powered. It’s satelllite linked to geostationary satellites. The box has wifi or wimax coming out of it. “This box, dropped almost anywhere in the world, creates a cloud of IP connectivity over a couple of square miles, depending on the geography.” This, he thinks, is a better solution than the phone ladies reselling the existing cellular network. And, besides, people need more than voice. They’ll need all sorts of IP connectivity. At first, people will use the cloud with cheap wifi phones, but eventually computers will get there. “Even if the box doesn’t make engineering sense, and it makes anticorruption sense because it doesn’t need to connect to a monopoly.” He talks about the need for microcredit and maybe subsidies, but, as much as possible, these boxes and the provision of services over these boxes (which need not be the same) should have a local stake with local gain in order to encourage development.

He recommends a series of small scale steps, done on the “edge” of the network.

[Great talk. Discussion follows…]

Bob Frankston says it’s more important to spread opportunity than solutions. But there’s a feaful desire in the US to define the solution narrowly; we’re afraid of the open, decentralized model. People are afraid of Skype, he says, because the contents are encrypted. He introduces the term “ambient connectivity,” i.e., everything is connected without your even thinking about it. We need to find a model for this. The key piece missing is pervasive encryption because right now it’s not safe to share your connectivity.

David Isenberg wonders what Monique Maddy of Adesemi thinks how Grameen microcredit model might work in Africa. She says she wouldn’t invest in the “phone ladies” model because the cost of cellphones is coming down so fast that the barrier to entry is too low.

Eileen McKeough has been operating a Somali telcom for 7 years. She liked it when Tom talked about getting revenues to the phone ladies since you have to get money to the edge, not just technology. She talks about a Grameen project in Bangladesh where a benefactor pays for Skype Out for a village. She’d like someone to get a premium number in the UK so people could call in and the revenue could be shared with the village. (She mentions that Bangladesh legalized VoIP this week.)

Tom says that telephone numbers are an asset that can be divorced from the physical infrastructure. He recommends organizations use Vonage which allows you to use a US area code wherever you are, thus lowering the cost of calling in and out.

Raj Sharma of Nextone wonders if there’s room for premium services for business. He wouldn’t at this point be willing to put his business on Skype.

David Isenberg says that Skype has twice the audio bandwidth of conventional telephony. He says the question is when latency and jitter will be good enough for business. David says research shows latency is going down dramatically, heading towards 50ms or less anywhere on the Net. It’s showing the effect of Moore’s Law. So, Raj’s concerns are real but temporary. Plus, the ability to integrate with IP text, IP photos and IP everything in a few years will flip the concern: “You mean I have to use a conventional phone for my business call? What a drag!”

Raj agrees but wonders what will happen when some fraction of our 6 billion people are using the Net at the same time for phone and video, etc. Then it will be a “best effort” service.

Yes, says David, but the capacity of the Internet has continually increased apparently without limit. Plus, he’s done a back-of-the-envelope calculation that shows that even if we were all online at the same time, there’d still be a hundred dark fibers in a single cable line. (He admits that his calc is “silly” because the value of the variables can only be guessed at)

Rick Whitt of MCI — author of the crucial A Horizontal Leap Forward— says that there’s plenty of dark fiber available.

There’s discussion of MPLS (Multiprotocol Label Switching). Bob says it’s really an attempt to turn the clock back to circuit switching. [Circuit switching establishes a real, continuous circuit from phone A to B. Packet switching sends out the bits with the address of B and allows the wisdom of the net to route the packets.]

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