The Internet, now a boon for telephone companies, could well become their bane … If I had stock in the telephone company. I would sell it.
Predictor: Wall Street Journal
Prediction, in context:In a 1995 article for Wired magazine, Fred Hapgood covers the issues surrounding Internet telephony, quoting a Wall Street Journal article. Hapgood writes: ”The media reaction has been as dramatic: according to VocalTec’s PR firm, 1,000 stories were published about IPhone in the first month of its existence. For a moment the offiine media stopped reheating their leftover Internet reportage about nerds, spies, hackers, porn merchants, mad bombers, and child molesters and struggled to write what was for many their first serious Internet news stories. ‘The Internet, now a boon for telephone companies, could well become their bane,’ The Wall Street Journal ruminated gravely. ‘If I had stock in the telephone company,’ the Journal quoted one user, ‘I would sell it.’ The reasoning here is easy enough to follow. A prime-time call from New York to Los Angeles is about $15 per hour; from New York to Paris it runs about $60 per hour. Many countries bill originating long-distance calls at even higher rates. (Howard Jonas of IDT Communications, a call-back services company, quotes the price of a call from Tahiti to France at $270 per hour.) Internet access costs no more than $3 to $4 per hour, often much less. Many access services offer hundreds of hours of 28.8 Kbps modem connections for as little as $20 to $25 a month. So, we’re talking about making international phone calls for $3 to $4 per hour. The arbitrage prospects seem to be on the same order as dealing cocaine – only legal.”
Date of prediction: January 1, 1995
Topic of prediction: Communication
Subtopic: Internet Telephony
Name of publication: Wired
Title, headline, chapter name: IPhone: Will Telephony on the Net Bring the Telcos to Their Knees? Or Will it Allow Them to Take Over the Internet? (And, Oh, Yes, It’s Damn Hard to Tap)
Quote Type: Direct quote
Page number or URL of document at time of study:
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/3.10/iphone_pr.html
This data was logged into the Elon/Pew Predictions Database by: Anderson, Janna Quitney