Tyler Hamilton writes about the imminent launch of Virgin Mobile Canada (around March 1). He believes that the clues are manifold: Sir Richard Branson (the flamboyant multi-millionaire) is coming to Toronto to participate in an upcoming Canadian Club lunch event (in March), more front-line sales activity and perhaps the fact that there is no longer a low-entry option for the young, consumer market segment, now that Rogers killed the old City Fido plan, so what better time than to grab those customers.  Coincidentally, Virgin will go after that exact same clientele that Fido once did (before it got neutered).  Which makes one wonder why Virgin and Bell could not have made a stronger play for Microcell after the initial low-ball offer from Telus?  Granted, it was a different network, but it would have gotten Bell a piece of the GSM action, something which Virgin Mobile is quite familiar with.  Besides, just having the same infrastructure will not eliminate other headaches such as OSS/billing integration, etc.

So here is some hope that the entrance of Virgin might shake up this otherwise oligopolistic market - although to follow the musical thread from the previous post, I would not even hold out as much hope for that, slapping on an andante tempo on cellular price drops... (the reason being that Virgin will rely on Bell Mobility's network).

Characterizing the market development of VoIP and the overall adoption of the technology can be tricky sometimes: one has to take the good news items and the bad ones and then try to see how they fit within the big picture.  There are many people drinking the VoIP Kool Aid and believing that the Class 5 switch to softswitch migration can take place within five years or that the entire enterprise installed TDM PBX base can migrate to IP PBXs by 2006. History shows that these transitions take far more time (witness how long it took for switches like the DMS to be deployed worldwide or how long the "digital PBX revolution" took). 

Despite that, there has been an incredible amount of optimism within the VoIP industry particularly during the past year (witness the great increase in attendance of conferences such as VON, Internet Telephony, and VoiceCon).  Perhaps the best way to temper some of these high expectations is to use a musical term: allegro ma non troppo.  This Italian tempo marking literally means "quick but not too quick".

Here are a couple of examples that suggest that VoIP's tempo is definitely not the presto that some are suggesting.  Om Malik wrote in his blog about a Forrester survey that found that only 13% of consumers were "interested" or "very interested" in VoIP.  Furthermore, that interest only goes up when consumers have a tangible benefit such as savings.  And, closer to home, Mark Evans mentions a Pollara survey that suggests that only 9% of Canadian Internet users would buy Internet service if it were priced at $20 per month.