Skype? What's Skype!?

Yesterday marked the demise of yet another middleware provider Syndeo Corp. The writing is on the wall. Feature-rich P2P end points are the future, everyone knows it. "VoIP holds the promise of integrating voice communications with other technologies to create a set of customized and personalized applications," said Keith Nissen, a senior analyst with In-Stat/MDR. "Where today's services are associated with a connection or a device, VoIP services will be associated with the subscriber, and will be accessible from any device, anywhere, over wireline or wireless access networks." There is a paradigm shifts coming our way in the communications industry very soon. Open standards P2P will play a big part in that. There is already a stir in the IETF circles about a P2P standards draft. There are very well known industry professionals working on this as I write this. The vision is to create a global P2P network with only standards-based end points as the fabric that holds everything together. That means no super-nodes or servers. The big bonus here is that there is no single point of failure, no server to bring you down or preclude you from signing up. No one company would own the network and therefore no one entity would control the network. There is the potential here for excellent revenues with the use of several mechanisms within the network and outside of the network. Anything from micropayment-based services to PSTN and media services. We will start seeing this become a reality in 2005.