Colorado appears to be on the verge of joining the ranks of those states that have eschewed any state regulation of VoIP.

With almost half of the states in the United States now on the non-regulation bandwagon, the reason I’m keen on writing about Colorado is because this is where I live. Were Colorado to attempt any state regulation of VoIP it would thus directly affect me and my Phone.com account.

It should be first understood that, as of this moment, Colorado’s Public Utilities Commission (PUC) does not regulate VoIP, nor has it any proposals before it to do so. But of course that could always change in the future, but not if the bills now in the Colorado Legislature are passed into law.

The first hurdle has been passed, with unanimous approval by Colorado’s House of Representatives of a bill that prohibits the PUC from setting any new rules, service standards of pricing regulations for VoIP, or for that matter any other service, which is carried over the Internet. The next step is approval by the state’s Senate, after which the governor has to sign it into law. No immediate roadblocks are known to exist to either happening.

The legislation “sends a message to the rest of the world that Colorado welcomes continued investment, new high-tech companies, and job growth from rapidly evolving Internet technologies,” state Democratic Representative Angela Williams, who co-sponsored the bill with Republican Representative Carole Murray.

As various states line up behind these sentiments, I think it is incumbent on me to point out that the issue is not VoIP regulation per se, but rather it’s what would happen if each of the 50 states had its own separate set of regulations. That could have a chilling effect on the VoIP industry, indeed could result in a few industry giants taking over from the highly innovative and competitive situation that exists today. That’s because of what would be a burdensome chore for a small company of complying with so many different regulatory regimes.

In other words, any regulation of VoIP needs to be at the federal level only, applicable to service no matter where in the country it occurs. I personally am particularly keen on the one issue of service standards – not regulations for VoIP companies, but rather regulations for Internet providers. As a small office/home office (SOHO) user of broadband and VoIP, I’m getting particularly tired of the phrase “up to” describing my broadband service. I’d be a lot happier if the FCC mandated that any broadband provider nationwide instead use the term “at least” when describing the speed they’re promising to sell me.

I’d also like the FCC to start dealing with the issue of nationwide revenue generation and distribution of funds for so-called “high cost” telephone service. Currently that comes from taxes on traditional phone service, but with VoIP rapidly displacing that service, the revenues are going down. In Colorado, for instance, there is a state fund that subsidizes rural landline phone service, but that’s going to decrease by $5 million annually as VoIP takes over, Colorado legislative researchers say. The only way out, it seems, is to increase the high cost phone service tax by about 10%, which no doubt will drive more users to VoIP, meaning up the tax again.

The solution … now why didn’t the FCC and Colorado government gurus think of this … is to stop providing high cost traditional phone service, and plow the money (while there is still some) into providing decent rural broadband, so those folks can benefit from VoIP.

Turns out that the rumors I wrote about a month ago (Who’s Got Your Number?) about the FCC considering new rules allowing VoIP providers to directly tap into the national telephone numbers pool were accurate. The FCC on April 18 issued a missive saying that they’re embarking on a six month test of the ramifications of just such a rule.

Now don’t everyone rush out and think that it means anything the average VoIP user will notice, at least not yet.  But the stakes are big for the VoIP community as a whole, and if the bigwigs in Washington are convinced that the rules need to be changed it will, in my humble opinion (okay, I’m not so humble) signal both another nail in the coffin for plain old telephone service (POTS) and both decrease the cost and increase the reliability of VoIP.

What the FCC’s now mandated is a “a limited technical trial of direct access to numbers” by a cadre of VoIP providers. Just who those are is not relevant – they simply represent the entire industry. And what the trial does is allow them to go directly to the national number pool to assign phone numbers to VoIP subscribers (for this test the numbers will be from the mobile phone pool). That’s in contrast to current rules, where VoIP companies need to go to local incumbent carriers (i.e. AT&T, Verizon and Century Link, for the most part) to get the numbers they provide to VoIP users. Put another way, the three giants that dominate the industry right now can hold VoIP providers hostage, perhaps, and at the very least get a direct look at what level of business VoIP carriers are doing in their territories.

If that isn’t a competitive advantage, I don’t know what is./p>

The FCC trial also represents a potential end to the area code system as we know it, since VoIP is not physically dependent on where a phone wire terminates. As the FCC says in its announcement of the test: “The relationship between numbers and geography—taken for granted when numbers were first assigned to fixed wireline telephones—is evolving as consumers turn increasingly to mobile and nomadic services. We seek comment on these trends and associated Commission policies.”

I won’t go into all the niceties of the FCC action, which runs to well over 100 pages. It’s all there on the web for anyone interested, at https://www.fcc.gov/document/direct-access-numbering-nprm-order-and-noi.

And I’ll be watching over the coming months to see the outcome of all of this, and what it means to users of VoIP carriers such as Phone.com.

Google, and perhaps others to follow, is planning to bring super-fast broadband to different U.S. cities, with Austin, Texas, tipped as being the next major deployment after its launch in Kansas City, Mo.

Many pundits have commented about what this means to both Google’s ambitions to become an ISP or to the competitive environment in the major markets it enters as a broadband provider. The competition will be the likes of Verizon FiOS or AT&T U-Verse or a major cable company like Time Warner in Austin and major cable-system operators Comcast, Cablevision and Charter elsewhere. 

One thing is certain: Our nation as a whole needs superfast gigabit broadband and will benefit economically from Google’s entry as a service provider that drives competition versus other providers.  Competition brings consumers and businesses more choices, spawns new businesses and causes productivity to rise. Washington knows that the value of bringing high-speed Internet to all corners of the U.S. will boost the economy and more broadband capacity will mean services providers of all stripe, especially those in the cloud, will see opportunities to offer businesses and consumers innovative alternatives to the major carriers.

Indeed, it will be interesting to see  what a new, uber-fast broadband ISP might mean to providers  that supply dial-tone and a host of value-added services.  Some might call these services “Over The Top” (OTT), but I prefer to think of these innovative offerings as value-added services, which is why the Google move to deploy broadband in many markets could have a positive impact on the growth and trajectory of OTT services and on the value-added providers that deploy and market them.

In the past, there were several debates, some of which reached the FCC or state regulators, addressing “fair play” when bandwidth owners – including Verizon, AT&T, Comcast and the like — could control and perhaps did control the quality of broadband for services that competed with their own. Most notably, these included voice over IP services, such as Vonage or even Skype.  The issue of “net neutrality” has also been discussed for many years and has been addressed to some extent, but I am not certain that the problem is really solved or over.  It all depends on whether Google decides to play the same game as the big traditional carriers, or if it forgoes the old monopoly mindset and truly competes against the old guard carriers and encourages new services to ride on its broadband fiber network.

So what does Google’s broadband mean to VoIP?  It certainly does not seem as though Google is going to supply its superfast broadband as a standalone service without TV and other services. The company is already offering Google TV in Kansas City.  Will it also become a phone service provider? Will it remain with its current voice, chat and video offering?

If Google will honor “net neutrality,” its network’s faster speeds and more bandwidth will spur greater demand and increased IP use and better quality IP.  For the OTT and value-added service providers, that means their services will work better and be “closer” to more households and primarily small businesses.  OTT / value added services bring a tremendous boost to small business. Different cloud-based solutions improve productivity and connectivity. Superfast broadband will just fuel the growth of such services even more than today.

The danger is if Google builds out this network and then starts acting like an AT&T or a Comcast – for example, if it offers full TV service as we know it today, or if it offers a commercial phone service and then makes network-design decisions to give higher-quality / more-accessible IP to its own service and hurts the competition, or if it attempts to charge OTT service providers as well as end-user customers for use of its broadband — then we are taking two steps back.

Like any technology for communication and commerce since before the turn of the last century, bigger is better: new roads, better ships, shorter trips, aviation and telecom etc. ; now bigger data pipes will contribute to the economy of the city. A faster and greener economy outlook will cause more businesses to open and OTT services can become more of the norm.

So if Google keeps everything neutral, those customers will have a chance to enjoy OTT services as one of the best and more cost-effective business phone services, at a fraction of what they used to pay.

On the other hand, if Google’s service ends up being just a faster version of the incumbents’ broadband, then eventually it and the incumbents will end up competing with one another.  Personally, I would like to see companies like Google enter the market for faster broadband not to offer their own “everything” but rather to serve as a super utility and allow startups and other new offerings to flourish without the threat of the incumbents changing the playing field.  Google should stand to benefit from such an open market.

Yes, Google can offer its own video conferencing and its own chat and its own many other apps and services, but if it  focuses on doing everything just like the current broadband  incumbents, then I don’t see the greater good.  Google will fall into that same trap of being no different than the big telcos and cable companies.

Also, what is still missing from this new Google service is the mobile aspect. Google is already offering free Wi-Fi in some citie,s but that is not the big picture. I would anticipate that the focus on Gigabit fiber could impact the efforts on the mobile front, but mobile uses spectrum, a resource that is limited, while adding more fiber strands brings more capacity to where wireless can’t always. Another reason to stay away from the “offer everything” approach.

Overall, I welcome superfast Gigabit broadband. America needs it. It is not cheap and whoever provides it needs to get paid for offering it. I believe the model has to be different from the ones the current incumbents offer. That will bring more openness and many great value-added services that are both business changing and life changing.

In my daily wanderings around the Internet I just read a little opinion piece by a young journalist in which he predicted that “plain old telephone service,” or POTS for short, isn’t going to go away any time soon. POTS is, of course, the old switched phone network which VoIP service is rapidly replacing for both business and residential use.

Intrigued by the headline, I read on, and soon discovered that the guy was basing his theory in part on the fact that he had been using a cell phone as his only means of communications. For him POTS was a new discovery! He went on to rave about its stability and security in comparison to wireless communications.

VoIP did get a mention … but just barely. No notice that the U.S. Army, as I’ve recently written, is busily switching over to VoIP. Indeed, gone are the days that any high school hacker could listen in on their neighbor’s VoIP conversations if they were both on the same cable television broadband loop. The new rival technologies used by traditional cable and phone companies are, for the record, secure. At least the U.S. Army thinks so, and who am I to argue with the U.S. Army?

And of course if the security is good enough for the government, I dare say it’s more than good enough for small business VoIP users. For enterprise VoIP users too.

Also getting short shrift is a discussion of the fact that, for the large majority of small office – home office (SOHO), small business, and residential VoIP users the infrastructure to deliver the broadband for VoIP is the precise same infrastructure used to deliver POTS (or, in the case of cable subscribers, the same as used to deliver video service). We’re told that, because the technology used to deliver that broadband is evolving, VoIP isn’t a clear choice.

Now wait a minute. Let’s remember the old mechanical switches that were the backbone of the POTS network. I was actually present when the first computer-based phone switch was unveiled. POTS technology evolved constantly (anyone remember Millie the operator and the old plug boards?) and nobody questioned that, so why question VoIP just because broadband technology is evolving.

Bottom line: POTS may hang on for a bit longer, through inertia, but I think some folk may be surprised at just how soon it is going to go away. Put another way, remember the old American Telephone & Telegraph Company (i.e. AT&T, or Ma Bell)? Well, it’s the new AT&T who last year went to the Federal Communications Commission asking for permission to pull the plug on POTS as the “fall back” communications network in the United States.

Oh, and by the way, the opinion piece appeared on what’s now just a web site called Byte. I remember the days when Byte was formidable multi-hundred page magazine, one against which I occasionally competed. Back then the gurus thought it could never die. Simply unthinkable. Just as its unthinkable to some that POTS will soon die.

But die it did, in 1998, at the tender young age of just 23. Reincarnation came with a web-only offering, launched in 2011. And just as the once glorious age of print publications have migrated to the Internet, my prediction is that our young guru is going to be stunned at the speed at which telephony similarly migrates to the Net.