Like you, I take incremental changes and small moves in technology and disruption in stride. Then something will happen to make me sit up straight in my chair and say, “Whoa!” as I realize how much is going on in some given space, the pace of change within it and how much disruption is occurring when my attention was elsewhere.

Since I don’t specifically follow the telephony space, I sat bolt upright today as I realized that there is A LOT more going on in with Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) than I’d ever dreamed.

Yesterday’s post about Skype vs. Gizmo and their respective call-out pricing, had two guys weigh in with comments: Kris Tuttle who is a researcher with interesting things to say about this space and a guy named Ken Kennedy who left a comment with this amazing link to VoIP providers around the planet.

Over lunch today I went through a few dozen of these links (skimming only, of course) and thought about what was happening with voice. I was stunned by how many providers are offering robust and interesting voice services. Of course, interoperability between providers is key (and the basis for the open SIP protocol) for a level playing field of services to explode with use.

I’ll come back to this post on Skype and the disruptive innovation occurring in telephony and that, “Telephony companies are on life support (and arguably have been for
years) but their death may never come even though they may be in a vegetative state for decades. The voice over IP (VoIP) disruptive innovation is going to continue and, in my opinion, accelerate as always-on, ubiquitous wireless internet connections proliferate.” The kicker? Most people I know:

a) Won’t take the time to play with most of these providers and figure out how to use them

b) Just want to pick up a phone and dial it to connect with someone

c) Won’t bet their personal telephony use — or especially their business use — on some unknown provider or service that can’t give them a service level agreement or ensure a qualitative experience for callers

d) Don’t care and get pissed off when they do choose a provider and can’t call between services. The mess with instant messaging is a great example as AIM, Yahoo, Microsoft and Jabber users couldn’t interoperate and IM each other across services.

Throw in companies embracing the Asterisk open source PBX for businesses (which is SIP-based) and we’ll experience growing demands for seamless and quality interoperability. I also see this entire space as one just waiting for someone to herd-the-cats together and offer an infrastructure from which interoperability between services can occur

The good news? All of us will win with all the energy, effort and enthusiasm being pored into internet telephony as services make this space better and better.

Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) is really coming of age. In the last year, I’ve experienced a marked shift of companies I do business with using the Asterisk open source PBX, many people and companies using the Skype PC-based system, and hardly anyone I know using SIPPhone or GizmoProject.

This post is about Gizmo and Skype specifically and what accelerates adoption and what doesn’t.

I love Gizmo. It sports a far superior and more intuitive interface than Skype; recording capability built right in to the software; and an open vs. a proprietary protocol (Skype’s is closed).

When I’ve been in spirited discussions about Skype’s superior peer-to-peer architecture over SIP’s point-to-point one, I’m interested…to a point. What I care most about is a system that provides significant cost reduction, new features and benefits along with my biggest hot button: double the call quality over landline-to-landline calling (8khz on phone lines vs. 16khz with VoIP approaches taken by Skype and Gizmo).

But I’m really wrestling with why I’d use Gizmo over Skype. I’m on the phone an average of 10 hours per week which is 520 hours a year or 31,200 minutes (I call both local and long distance in the US and in Canada to both mobile and landlines) and:

• I pay Skype $30 and have unlimited calling in the US and Canada for one year
• I’d pay Gizmo $624 for those same minutes at about two cents per minute.

The international rates are cheaper on Skype which hasn’t been a big deal for me since the people I talk to internationally are on Skype. To show you how little I’m using Gizmo and how Skype-oriented I’ve become, I still have over $8 of the Gizmo callout minutes I bought early last year and instead have paid the money for unlimited US and Canada calling ($29.95); purchased a SkypeIn phone number ($30); adapters, Wifi phones and other Skype stuff all because of no unlimited calling on Gizmo.

I *really* want Gizmo and SIP to succeed since it’s an open protocol and everyone can play in this sandbox with software and hardware. But just like the early days of paying by the megabyte for access to the Internet, it wasn’t until Earthlink had an all-you-can-eat for $19.95 per month that the doors blew off Internet use. I believe that’s what it’s going to take for Gizmo to get on the radar screen of users who are using Skype (Note: there are 8,692,139 online with Skype now which is nearly 3 million more than this time last year so it’s being adopted quickly).

Am I missing something? Should Gizmo immediately offer an unlimited $30 for an all-you-can-eat deal for calling in North America?

Early this morning I emailed Christian Long at think:lab (he’s a thought leader in School 2.0 and design for the future schools and cutting edge education) since I had sort of an "Aha!" and I knew he’d instantly understand the possibilities.

Schools constantly scramble for money. Access to thought leaders is challenging for the big Districts…let alone ones in rural schools. Same thing with respect to kids in other countries and this is acute in developing ones especially.

Connecting up kids with the best and brightest, the thought leaders, the astronauts and Senators, or even people from different disciplines whom educators would like to expose their kids to, spending huge bucks on satellite downlinks, lots of gear and technicians to set it all up simply isn’t possible in today’s current school funding situation.

But a few hundred dollars is possible and a missed opportunity if not acted upon.

When I first read Frances Cairncross’ book Death of Distance back in the late 1990′s, her premise that geography and distance would dissolve was a prescient perspective at the time. Not only has it dissolved, but the tools (like Skype and the Internet itself along with all the solutions leaping onto the scene) are accelerating the rate at which distance is becoming increasingly irrelevant.

The experiential impact of having Malcolm Cohan talking over Skype from Australia to Minneapolis (see Sydney to Minneapolis on Skype Video) was a wakeup call to me about the power of Internet-centric communications and how *I* have taken it for granted in some ways…but it caused me to have a knowing that I had to help others understand what’s possible right this minute.

Though what I’m about to describe has implications for businesses of all sizes as well as non-profit organizations desiring to have interactive venues with key people, I’m especially keen on what this can mean to schools and specifically K-12 education.  Educators could begin to tap into the knowledge and brain trust that exists globally without budgeting for big infrastructure or the expense of flying someone to their location. They could even connect with other educators — perhaps a professor steeped in knowledge of a topic *or* even another classroom on the other side of the world — for laughingly low costs.

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