Beyond Quad Play - XoIP

Letter From the Editor, March 2007.

“The Americans have need of the telephone, but we do not. We have plenty
of messenger boys.”
- Sir William Preece. Chief Engineer of the British Post Office, 1876.

There are many ways to access information and entertainment. Long before the internet and its instantaneous searches for information, anyone could probably still find out about just about anything... but it might take a while. It might take research, travel, correspondence, conversation, invention, or other cumbersome means... but it was possible.

The same goes for entertainment. For thousands of years, entertainment has grown and flourished. Sweeping stories from Gligamesh to Gone With the Wind have riveted millions for generations. Playwrights from Aeschylus to Shakespeare to August Wilson have caused patrons to laugh and cry and experience joy and catharsis. Yet again, however, these entertainment options have often only been available to those who happen to live within earshot of the performer. Most entertainment options tended toward the more homegrown.

My point has little to do with the pros and cons of oral tradition, however. My point has to do with the willingness of society to evolve to a place where communication of ideas, culture, information, education, is widespread and accessible to all. That’s where the growth of XoIP comes in. We are getting to the point where anything can be the realm of IP. How exciting! Voice, data, video and all the rest have been fun, but they are honestly just the beginning. Sir William made the mistake of seeing the effective and well-run postal system as being the end-all and be-all of communications. Have many SPs not made similar mistakes in recent times? Do we ever suffer from a collective lack of imagination?