Martin Geddes says we’re at ‘Peak Telecom’ — the maximum point of expansion of telecom companies, just before the Internet gobbles them up and changes the economics drastically, commoditizing them into pipe:

Peak Telecoms by Martin Geddes

We’re at “Peak Telecoms”

The telco voice and messaging business is on the verge of going into meltdown. As this is where the margins come from, the problem is hard to exaggerate. The drip-drip of links about declining voice and messaging volume and revenue is becoming a small stream. Even mobile telephony is losing ground in competition to asynchronous messaging. Twitter and Facebook message volumes are exploding, and SMS is beginning to sink. Termination and roaming are endangered species, hunted by packs of voracious regulators. There is no way back.

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In their place, a raft of “internet-time” start-ups are taking their place, filling in the missing features that decades of neglect of the voice and messaging business have left behind. (You mean I still can’t record and search my calls in 2012? Wow!) There’s a few years of catch-up that will let smart operators wring extra services revenue our of feature-starved users.

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Whether it is voice, messaging or video, the chain of money from application to transmission to infrastructure is breaking down.

Martin paints a grim picture for the telcos, which if you hold up to the mirror, looks pretty good for the users. His advice for telcos is dead on, go read it.