Such a move by Apple is significant as this will allow users to treat their voice calls as bits of data that can be transmitted without incurring additional charges (on an unlimited data plan) for using minutes and driving revenues up for the iPhone carrier here in the United States.

This is an important announcement for those of you who use Skype and want to save your minutes for your calling.  Skype will undoubtedly be updating their application to take advantage of this new feature, if you’d like to try it today download the iCall, Fring or Acrobits application and start calling right away.

Google’s voice application may now allow users of their service to now try out that service, as of today you can access that application by going to m.google.com/voice.

Hopefully, this trend will continue and we will see more applications on different platforms follow suit, in the meantime, stay tuned.

It’s technology uses the the radio frequencies that wireless carriers have paid billions of dollar for.

It would work only with GSM-based devices and would seemingly be a great attractor of lawsuits from wireless companies, however according to ABC News, Borislow claims wireless licenses don’t extend into the home.  Keep a lookout for this device in the spring or summer of this year – this could be very interesting

So with 2009 in the rearview mirror and the future ahead of us, what do we have to look forward to regarding the telecom industry?  Well to start out with, the FCC has placed a request for comments on how transitioning from the current circuit-switched network to become a soley IP-based network.  The circuit switched network, according to Wikipedia “In telecommunications, a circuit switching network is one that establishes a circuit (or channel) between nodes and terminals before the users may communicate, as if the nodes were physically connected with an electrical circuit.” and an IP network (a very basic definition) is a network that supports the devices using the Internet Protocol – or the language of the internet if you will.  Regardless, this is a huge move for the industry as a whole.

Alright, you’re asking yourself  what does all that really mean?  Well, the traditional system we have all known and loved is essentially is started to show its age.  Not only have the demands of technology stressed service providers to do more for its customers, the limitation of the older networking is starting to hamper the future of what we could be seeing from the the telecom and IT industries in general.  Real time portable video phones, augmented reality showing data queries instantly would not be possible with the limitations of networks that really have been designed for the limited purpose of ONLY carrying voice traffic.

Enter AT&T who has has publicly stated that they DO NOT want to be in the landline business any more.  POTS (Plain Old Telephone Service), the legacy phone service has become a boat anchor for the telecos to maintain.  In fact, AT&T has written the FCC supporting the transition from a legacy network to a broadband and IP-based infrastructure, this would allow them to not have to support their old network and be able to focus and concentrate on building the network of the future.

According to a recent survey, fully 20% of US households use mobile phones exclusively.  This could be a telling sign that consumer acceptance of relying on a strictly landline service is changing and that supporting an old circuit-switched network may in fact be money out the window

Switching won’t happen overnight, and there are a lot of small items to consider that are tangled into the old environments, but we we can see is that in the coming years, look to see massive changes to the telecom world.  This will effect everything from service level guarantees, future services involving communication services and of course – your phone bill.

For the most part, we’re watching the industry pretty tightly now.  Whenever changes are made, it is the opportune time for companies to come in, make money and take advantage of confusion when it doesn’t have to be.  Be sure to come back frequently, we’ll update you on any changes we seeing coming down the pike , we’ll warn you to keep your eyes peeled people – it’s only going to be more fun!

Now if you’re currently using AT&T, you won’t see sudden cutoffs on your data where it will stop working, rather, AT&T is attempting to rein in “excessive” data use by  forcing customers to pay premiums for high usage or optimal quality of service.  It seems that 3% of their smartphone customers currently chew up 40% of their network capacity.

According to a Rethink-Wireless Article, Ralph de la Vega, AT&T’s head of wireless indicated “We’re going to try to focus on making sure we give incentives to those small percentages to either reduce or modify their usage so they don’t crowd out the other customers in those same cell sites,” he said, though he was short on actual details of how this would be achieved.

What this will do is create two areas for the consumer to be concerned with:

1.  Learn what applications are the bandwidth hogs and mitigate your current usage

2.  Application developers will have to re-write applications and design future apps to be more conservative with data usage.

AT&T is not the only mobile carrier concerned with customer usage of it’s data services.  Sprint/Nextel CEO Dan Hesse commented at its investor conference: “When you think about postpaid …. it’s not just going to be your phone. It’s going to be your camera, your iTouch, your gaming device – they’re all going to become wireless, so what’s going to be the right plan for those? As we move into 4G, it’ll be much less about minutes and more about gigabytes as the main driver of what customers are buying per month, because it’s going to be VoIP oriented. Minutes will be largely irrelevant.”

Regardless, the future of wireless is about to change and for some, it’s dramatic change.  If you thought a flat-rated plan was your answer to leveling your wireless costs- guess what?  It’s only about to get more complicated.

Skype has huge potential to reduce a company’s long distance charges and VoIP and IP video vendors have taken note.  Companies such as Cisco, Shortel, PIP Foundry (Nortel subsidary) and LifeSize are some of those vendors have looked to integrate Skype into their hardware offerings.

Skype was sold to eBay in 2005, it’s purpose for eBay never materialized and while it was purchased for $2.6 billion, it has been written down to $1.7 billion and is looked to be spun off as a separate company in 2010.

However, the future of Skype is now uncertain.  Why, it seems that the founders of Skype want to buy it back from eBay AND have filed lawsuits claiming essential code which is a core piece of peer-to-peer communications was not included in the deal (eBay lawyers should be in hot water for this one).  While they have been licensing the code from the original founder’s new company Joltid, they decided to revoke the license from Skype.  Unless they’re able to find an alternative, shortly, the future of where this will head is far from guaranteed.

If your company happens to be utilizing Skype or worse, relying on it.  Make sure you have alternative technologies available for you to use.  It will definitely be worth planning for any contingency events.

ref: here and here