Wow – quite a lot of things happening while I was away! Residential VoIP has become the hottest app du jour among all the service providers, being attacked by fixed and mobile carriers, MSOs, and Internet portals. Cable operators in particular have been quickly adding new subs, reaching about 1.4 million users and 0.5 net adds in the US in Q2 ‘05. On the fixed side, Verizon and Bell South are going through the process of picking vendors and early network deployment. The incumbents are protecting their turf, particularly since new entrants such as Vonage have had success gaining new subscribers. AOL also announced TotalTalk, a new service that is integrated with AIM (AOL Instant Messenger app) and is expected to compete with other VoIP services from Yahoo! and MSN.

Another story I heard from an European analyst is the rapid fall in prices of 3G base stations.  Nortel was claiming that its recently introduced base station supports both GSM and UMTS in the same cabinet and can handle 50% more voice and data subscribers than other dual-mode base stations available.  If we were to consider price drops of about 75%+ over a 2 year period from the likes of Nortel and Alcatel, that is nothing short of an incredible result.  This means that base station pricing is dropping at a substantially faster rate than the normal rule of thumb from the vendors of an annual price erosion of 10 to 15%.