Fortress Germany Walls Out VoIP?

Many, many years ago I was an analyst covering telecom services at the Yankee Group in Boston. In those days of yore, I remember writing an article about Deutsche Telekom’s laughable attempt to develop “bit meters.” They wanted to attach these devices to all digital private line services. You see, some sneaky little customers had figured out that there was good money to be saved by arbitraging dedicated lines against expensive switched digital services. DT wanted to measure and charge for every bit that was carried on their network, and the bit meters were going to make it possible.

This morning’s WSJ brought it all back in an amusing flash when I read that T-Mobile is threatening to cut off Skype use by its iPhone customers. Some things will never change. It seems there is a disorderly, non-rule-abiding cabal that has decided not to pay T-Mobile’s eminently reasonable €4 per minute charge for a transatlantic call, and is instead rebelliously embracing the free alternative. A T-Mobile spokesman even claimed that using Skype over a T-Mobile Wi-Fi hot spot is a ‘breach of contract.’ These Skype users are probably the same anarchists that download music from iTunes instead of buying CDs at WalMart. They must be stopped. All 400 million of them.