Telruptive

In the same week Twilio announced global SMS delivery, WAC was declared a failure.
Was it a surprise? Not really. Developers want simple APIs that are cheap and global. Twilio offers this, WAC does not. Are operators learning anything? The answer is they are not.
Telecom dogma 1: Users will not use a service that is not a global standard.
Internet response: proprietary APIs.
Telecom dogma 2: 99.999% availability with expensive hardware and Oracle RAC is the only way to launch a telecom service.
Internet response: Amazon and Rackspace virtual servers and MySQL.
Telecom dogma: I am the king. I put prices and users have to pay them.
Internet response: $1/virtual number, $0.01 SMS/call per minute.
How can a company with less than 100 employees offer better pricing than the actual network owners?
Operators are thinking ROI in 6 months and then ask what users might like. Internet players launch something simple and cheap, get continuous feedback and improve the service. In 12-36 months they dominate the world.
Know any bad service on the Internet that had a good ROI in 6 months? If you do not provide what users want, ROI will be a lie in your Excel. Forget 99.999%, forget RFPs, forget 40-70% revenue shares, etc. Either you innovate and launch in 3 months with daily improvements afterwards or you will not be an Internet player. The alternative is being a bit pipe. But even there Freedom Pop, Free.fr, Google FttH, etc. might spoil ROI…