France

Another area where the modular approach is starting to have an impact is in the telephone service arena. Traditionally, telephone service was offered on a land line and was divided into local service, long distance, and extra features like caller ID, call forwarding, etc… The model was predicated on the concept of one device (the phone) receiving a package of services. The mobile phone business started having an impact by untying the phone lines from the wall, making the concept of localization a relatively moot point. Once localization was broken, the differentiation between local and long distance disappeared which left a division only between connectivity and extra features. Since most of the signals going over the air became digital, the cost of delivering extra services dropped to almost nothing, destroying the competitive value of such offerings. While mobile phone service made headway against traditional land lines, a new set of telephone offerings appeared on the Internet: Voice over IP. With VoIP, telephone just becomes a software issue, unbundling telephone from the concept of a telephone network and dropping the connectivity issue altogether. While mobile phones were tied to a particular phone network, VoIP phones are not tied to any network:…