Earlier this month voice over IP mogul Vonage announced they will start offering unlimited international phone calls between forty nations starting at $54.99 a month. Needless to say this is a major upset for most international call providers, whose fees are nowhere near as cheap. The telephone industry has had its fair share of names prematurely put into the obituaries, but this latest move by Vonage may very well be the beginning of the end of traditional telephone service
This is because major telephone service providers are pulling more and more of their profit from international calls due to a decrease in domestic landline use globally over the last ten years. More and more people are abandoning their home phones completely in favor of mobile service exclusively, and due to this focus on the profit gained by international calls, a major undercut like that of Vonage's may do an unprecedented amount of destruction on these companies.
This issue represents the unavoidable truth that wireless Internet access is becoming the paramount piece of technology of the early century, leaving anyone still accessing the web through limited wired devices and even worse attempting to initiate paths of communication outside of it, in the dust. It also highlights the fast-growing establishment of internet access in even the farthest reaches of the globe, even if the technological action committed in making a traditional telephone call is archaic. As long as there's a computer with access to the Internet, someone can now make a phone call to anywhere else in the world for cheap. You could conceivably have a village making calls out of the country off just one laptop.
But the effects will be felt much harder in the industrialized nations where these companies make their profit. Imagine your typical citizen of the western world who makes phone calls internationally: a middle-aged to elderly immigrant calling family in the old country. Typically they'd be the perfect target customer for a typical international call provider. But what happens when their grandson can run over from across the street, bring along his laptop, a Wireless Adapter, and the family Vonage account? They never bother with $-a-minute phone service again.
The final chop into the telephone poll might be the way this service will affect those using mobile phones. More and more individuals, both calling and receiving, are using their mobile phones to communicate internationally, which jack the minute-rate up greatly. If people are able to use their mobile phones to make international calls and avoid the higher cost there's no telling how much business Vonage is going to steal.
While it's always a tough bet to call a centuries-old industry as a business in terminal decline, the way wireless Internet communication can consistently undercut the giants indicates it really is only a matter of time. But if they can't beat them they'll probably just join them. That's how you stick around another century.
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