Just two years left before the information age begins.

Information society

At the end of the 97th year, being a student at St. Petersburg GUT named after a respected professor Bonch-Bruyevich, I read an article in one journal from that in far 2013 our society, at least its progressive part, would enter a new phase of development and would be called “informational ". Then this concept for me was associated only with a couple of subjects - a personal computer and a mobile phone, the cherished dream of the majority of literate Russians of the late 90s.

Just like Darwin

Telecommunications entered our lives long before our birth, and perhaps our parents, as well as most of the young people, as well as their grandparents.
In the course of evolution several basic services and methods of calculation for their consumption were fixed. The services used by most of us include telephony and data transfer. The method of calculation for their consumption can also be conditionally divided into a fixed fee, a fee for the volume consumed and their combination in one form or another. It is interesting to note that in spite of the fact that voice transmission over digital channels is carried out in the same way and in the same format as data transmission using pulse-code modulation, all two types of tariffs are still separated when charging. and in terms of bytes, it turns out that the cost of transmitting 1 byte of voice was more expensive than 1 byte of data.

VoIP

VoIP (Voice over IP) technology is familiar to many for quite a long time, someone has only heard about it and has a general idea of ​​what it means, and another uses this technology and is not particularly interested in why a call from Moscow to Tatarstan on a card is cheaper once 10t than usual long-distance communication. In any case, with the advent of VoIP, the notion of Internet telephony came into our lives, when speech transmission uses coding and compression of voice information for its subsequent transmission through the Internet or transport networks, in any case, the cost of such calls is significantly reduced compared to classical telephony, and the quality is even much better, which I witnessed while studying in Leipzig in 1999-2000 and actively using the services of IP telephony providers.

Although it was not without a fly in the ointment, good voice quality was at a decent level mainly when using services from IP telephony providers. When using free Internet services, this quality was rather difficult to obtain, even inside a simple, unused LAN. These types of services were charged exclusively for the volume of services consumed.
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And Skype came

The appearance of Skype for many was like a bolt from the blue. For ordinary people who have relatives in different cities and countries, for those traveling on business trips or simply on vacation, the ability to make long distance calls free of charge from the Internet to the Internet or at attractive PSTN tariffs was appreciated. Not for nothing, 65% of skype shares in 2009 were valued at as much as $ 2 billion.

For telecommunication companies, the appearance of such a service was regarded as the beginning of Armageddon. It all started in the Western market with the deployment of 3G networks and launching them into commercial operation. At that moment, virtual operators began to emerge, offering VoIP-based services to 3G subscribers. In turn, the operators tried to protect themselves from this plague and began to impose all sorts of restrictions, both at the technical and at the tariff level. But Europe would not be Europe if it were not urgently passed laws protecting the rights of consumers (and not just producers and natural monopolists) and everything would not return to its place. Telephony began to be charged as telephony, and traffic in accordance with tariffs for data transmission.

In Russia, the big three gave an unequivocal answer - Skype and 3G will not be friends in Russia together! There were facts when, in fact, they took money for the data transmission via the Skype protocol, as for a long-distance call, although nothing was written about this in the tariff plan. But the operators did not stop there and continued to defend their “deprived” rights of monopolists, lobbying the law prohibiting the use of Skype in Russia. It should be noted that similar trends are observed in the old Europe, but there, unfortunately for monopolists, such tricks do not pass.

But ... It’s too early to put a point in this dispute. Skype, according to their specialists, is capable of disguising its traffic and then simple screening on the IP port will not be possible, but it will be very expensive to disassemble each IP packet and analyze it.

Flash free phone

Despite all the advantages of VoIP, this technology has a significant drawback; in order to take advantage of its capabilities, you need to install a client application and configure it to work. And this is not possible for everyone, otherwise the messengers would not be standing next to each metro station and would not offer the services of an omnipresent computer emergency service. It should be remembered that the main popular gateway for data transmission is becoming the Internet.

At the word Internet, each of us unequivocally associates surfing across its expanses using the same-name program from Microsoft — Internet Explorer (most users) or other browsers (for example, Firefox or Google Chrome). A number of manufacturers decided to circumvent this drawback and write their client application (more about the Russian counterpart and their product), which could be embedded in the WEB page.

Now the user does not need to configure anything, all that is required of him is just to put the standard Flash library from Adobe, which is done with a couple of clicks of the mouse and register with the service (in principle, you can do without registration). And then we are offered to take advantage of all the same benefits that Skype provides, namely free calls (including video calls) to Internet users or paid calls at attractive rates for PSTN.

Nowadays

The first decade of the second millennium on the development trend of broadband access, access to broadband access, the development of the Internet and the basic technologies underlying the services for the Internet can probably be described in general terms by the following points:
1. Significantly increased access speed for the end user;
2. Significantly reduced the cost per transfer of one megabyte;
3. There has been a marked increase in the computing power of computers;
4. The era of rapid development of mobile Internet has begun;
5. There is a tendency to organize large online communities under the auspices of forums, portals, dating sites, news resources and social networks.
6. The rapid development of the Internet and mobile digital television is underway.
Let's now mark the most key points. Basically, now the competition has reached a level where the user is provided with unlimited access to the mobile Internet at very significant speeds. Most of the users use one or another Internet resource, mainly in Russia it is the social networks VKontakte, Odnoklassniki or My World. In its mass on these Web resources, users have access to communications by means of sending messages, watching video clips or photos. Advertising is developing extensively (the Russian volume in absolute numbers has exceeded 20 billion rubles a year, which exceeds the budget for advertising in newspapers and competes on equal terms with publications in magazines) and trading via the Internet.

Science fiction

Perhaps I should say thanks to everyone in this place who made their way through such a long prelude to the main idea and still have not lost their interest in this article. THANK!
Let us return to “our sheep”, namely to VoIP, free flash phone, web browsers and the Internet and try to look at it from a different angle.
Let us now think about what can give the use of flash phone on Internet resources. At a minimum, users will be able to fully communicate with each other in all technically accessible ways (thank God is not needed for Internet telepathy). And what will this give new?

Quite an expected question.
Such business schemes are obvious to me. At a minimum, the user can be asked to view the commercial before he can make a free video call while on a business trip to Khanty-Mansiysk, home to Petersburg. Obviously, the resource that provided such an opportunity will be able to make money from advertising, and given the statistics of the user's activity, his interests and social circle, he will be able to show the user the so-called contextual advertising aimed at a specific audience, which means that all three parties benefit from it. user, WEB resource and advertiser.
Take for example the social network VKontakte. It is no secret that many large companies like Megafon or Beeline have their official accounts there. And now suppose that you can contact Megafon directly from your WEB page, leave your message and be sure that they will answer you, which is not so easy now to achieve through their usual Call Centers.

And if you take small companies, for which it is expensive to have your telecom infrastructure, and business requires communication with customers. Or even more, in order to successfully compete with large companies they are looking for their clients in social networks or simply on the Internet! This approach significantly increased their attractiveness. There is no need to go far beyond the example, take for example InTouch - an insurance company whose rapid growth is due to the minimization of costs using Internet technologies (CRM + CMS + ECM), and what would happen if they were provided with a full-fledged tool for communicating with the client!

In general, you can probably guess for quite a long time how it will be and what we would get, but now we can make the following conclusions with a high degree of confidence:
1. The approach to the tariffication of voice transmission will change, most likely it will either die completely or become for a fixed small fee;
2. Operators will earn not on traffic, but on services;
3. The concept between a cellular operator, a broadband access provider or a fixed operator will be erased. Only fixed and mobile broadband access operators will remain;
4. The approach to the Internet, as well as to the business in the Internet environment as a whole (it will no longer be associated with publicly available porn resources and pirated software, will change, and the first place will be the possibility of all types of communications, doing all sorts of business and getting all sorts of knowledge).
5. The role of specialized Internet resources classified by interests, social groups and services provided will increase.

2013 is just around the corner!