Cloud Summit Gives Traditional Telephony Its Props

With the exception of Wesley Chan’s salty language, the opening Cloud Communications Summit kinda reminded me of a song we used to sing in the Girl Scouts. It went something like this: Make new friends, but keep the old. One is silver and the other’s gold.

Panelists and audience members at this summit discussion spent a lot of time not only talking about what cloud communications portends and now enables; they also used a fair share of the session emphasizing how the underlying public network infrastructure that enables broadband, desktop phones and traditional phone numbers are alive and well, and an integral part of our new multi-modal communications environment.

Google’s Chan said that while the web is an equalizer that allows virtually anybody to create and offer new services, someone has to pay for the last mile connectivity to your home or business.

The panel also talked about how you can get into services cheaply, but once you start to operate on a large scale, you might want to consider investing in your own underlying infrastructure.

Trent Johnson from Hookflash asked why we would continue to use phone numbers in this new multimodal, cloud-based world when what we really need are identities. Chan responded that it’s because everyone has a phone number, so the phone number is the lowest common denominator.

An audience member also noted that the demise of the desktop phone did not happen as some had expected. Chan commented that’s because desktop phones work. He noted that when people are on a cell phone and have a lousy connection, they often reconnect using wireline phones.