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.

According to CNNMoney, “Verizon Wireless said early Friday it will lower prices on its unlimited wireless plans.  Later in the day, AT&T followed suit.  Verizon cut its unlimited family talk and text plan from $229.99 to $149.99 and its nationwide unlimited voice plan was reduced to $69.99 from $99.99.  An unlimited family voice plan will cost users $119.99, down from $199.99, and nationwide unlimited talk and text plans were lowered to $89.99 from $119.99.”

Regardless, we’re monitoring wireless rates for all carriers and how that effects our clients and interested parties.  While the number one and two carriers do battle, it means good news and cost savings for all consumers as price compression also affects the competitors where you will find changes with smaller players as well.  Pay attention to your bills, when your contract runs out, if you’ve recently signed a contract with either carrier, you may want to pull out the paperwork, give them a call and see if you can take advantage of this new pricing because more than likely, they won’t be calling to tell you how to reduce your  bill.

According to the report “The glitch – the result of a routing problem at the family’s wireless carrier, AT&T – revealed a little known security flaw with far reaching implications for everyone on the Internet, not just Facebook users.”, it goes on to indicate that “In each case, the Internet lost track of who was who, putting the women into the wrong accounts. It doesn’t appear the users could have done anything to stop it. The problem adds a dimension to researchers’ warnings that there are many ways online information – from mundane data to dark secrets – can go awry.”

This exposes what we in the industry have known for some time, even though you may practice safe internet privacy security, potentially your carrier can blow it all – and you are exposed.

This report probably has you shaking your head thinking “Wow, that’s crazy, I hope that doesn’t happen again”, or “AT&T better get their act together.” but let me ask you this – what if you’ve already been compromised?  What if it was your account these women accessed?  Or worse, what if some hacker who didn’t alert the media just kept on digging through your private information and found something that you wouldn’t want published on the internet?

I’ve been in the industry for over 2 decades and I’ll readily admit when I was on the other side working for some of these telecommunications carriers we saw things that would absolutely stun you – yes it really does happen.  These things NEVER made the paper and at times some of these failings were frightening.  I’m also here to tell you that most of us will glance over this article and think – that’s horrible, shrug your shoulders and move on.

If you’re a manager within a company, I’m giving you this warning – you’re not as secure as you think.  You need to be aware of what you’re exposing online and how your employees are accessing specific information and what they’re putting online.  As more and more companies chose their vital services to be run via  “cloud computing“, it is extremely important you know all risks associated with doing so and what you can do to limit your exposure to data loss.

If you’re reading this article and you’re concerned about protecting your privacy, continue to do the safe things such as changing your passwords, using encryption when possible or  simply keep what you want to keep private OFF the internet.  You won’t be able to do a thing if a carrier slips up, but try and minimize the damage by reducing your exposure and risk.  Be safe out there.

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.

AT&T has been accused of being at the bottom of the reason that application has been denied availability from Apple iPhone, and in return AT&T has given Google a “shot across the bow” by accusing the Google Voice application to not be allowed to call certain rural areas, conference calling services, and “chat lines” (the reason being is that carriers pay rural telecom companies a higher revenue amount by terminating calls on their network – more on this at a later date).  Their claim is that Google should operate in the same manner as they have to (read: they have to do this, why shouldn’t Google?).  However, Google’s claim is that they only offer certain services and shouldn’t be regulated as a wireless company.

The end result is uncertain, but what I can say is that Google is making some inroads.  Last Tuesday Verizon announced that Google Voice application would be supported and even AT&T indicated, without mentioning Google to allow iPhone users to utilize VoIP applications on the AT&T 3G network.

The times they are a-changing.  What the end result allows for will have to be seen, what we know for sure is that you can be certain your bills will be effected, up or down – stay tuned.