VoIP carriers are severely challenged. They need to begin attracting customers. Not the small number that have come on board today, but the conversion of the millions who have yet to sign up.
The biggest audience are the teens and young twenty year olds who have a cell phone, live at home and will soon be on their own. This is the Skype/Gizmo generation, that also grew up on IM. They love text messaging, as their parents cell phone bills can attest, but what they really love is the cool new stuff that the mobile operators have been slow to embrace.
Sure the carriers all tell you they embrace the vision, but when it comes to telephony at home in their mind it's a cell phone, when really it should be an IP phone.
Reading this story in the New York Times today got me wondering. When will the wireless guys enter VoIP? The answer is they won't. Not directly. They will do it via alliances and federations, likely via the cable MSO's here in the USA as Sprint has already started to do.
With 3GSM looming, and Boingo getting ready to roll out their dual mode handsets, the time is coming to really open the gates and provide the already ready generation of users a real way to communicate.