A common theme in the halls of carriers and ISPs is that they want to evolve from being dumb pipes to value-added portals and content destinations. For example,

A common theme in the halls of carriers and ISPs is that they want to evolve from being dumb pipes to value-added portals and content destinations. For example, the cell phone industry's solution to this is to sell ringtones (among other things). I think that these numbers really highlight the folly of that line of thinking. These entire methods of communicating have been outmoded -- while nobody's saying that people are going to stop talking on the phone to each other, watching kids (defined as people and their peer groups who have always owned SMS capable phones) use their telephones is entirely different than the way people who didn't grow up with SMS do. The devices are more like portable IM terminals that can make phone calls when they need to talk to someone, particularly people outside their demographic. At first I was kind of skeptical about 4G mobile technology, where every application runs in an IP stack -- even voice. It hasn't taken very many of these articles to convince me that this is absolutely going to happen, and sooner than I thought at first. But much to the dismay of the carriers, this growth is going to happen in spite of their portals, not because of it. People are communicating in communities several layers abstracted from the infrastructure they're paying for. This is pretty disruptive, especially to the ISPs that are providing the means as they try to diversify into areas that are basically mature and becoming legacy (telephone and cable). I don't have any magic solution or proposal for innovating in the space but it's going to be fascinating to watch the evolution.