Specific products are: Skype is disruptive. Google Voice/Grand Central is disruptive. VoIP is very disruptive in the wholesale world (SIP/all-IP transport, softswitches).

But hosted SIP PBXes/phones as provided by Vonage, Speakeasy VoIP, and the like are just cheaper (and sometimes a little more convenient) than landlines.

It’s not a Clayton Christensen-style disruptive innovation that would be evaluated on totally different merits. Customers evaluate it against cell phones and landlines, and like you said, cell often wins.

Many hosted PBX vendors even disable the knobs that might be disruptive (or at least uniquely appealing), like by disallowing devices other than their own.

As a service, pure VoIP will never turn the consumer phone industry on its head. On the upside, at least SIP is finally easy to setup…

/b

Although I haven’t kept up with where it’s went, Truphone had integrated a feature into their mobile application which used another company who automated connection to networks with the awkward connection policies you described. It was a data collection nightmare but that was their job. Since they should cover most of the companies who sell off-the-shelf wifi protection systems like that to corporations, it should work pretty well once you’ve entered your username/password and accepted the EULA on a previous trip. For premium networks I think it could automatically deduct money from your Truphone balance to pay for it or give you a much nicer prompt to enter the information. Don’t quote me on the last part though since it’s been a while.

Jason, I don’t envision all the cell phones of the world seamlessly switching to wifi anytime there’s any accessible network available. A good chunk of the workforce in a place like NYC is white-collar workers who either already have wifi at work and home or whose employers would put in wifi in a heartbeat it if meant that their calls got the added benefit of encryption during a time when cell phone calls are generally distrusted by everyone.

@Brian UMA is basically what Truphone does although they don’t obviously own the carrier’s radio access network. Instead they own the phone number and proxy calls back-to-back to you. Cool stuff, though.

Someone has to build a reliable global network that is uniformly accessible. The closest effort I know of is Fon with their Foneros (http://www.fon.com/en/), but simply not pervasive enough.

Where WiFi/VoIP may help offload network traffic is to allow VoIP on the handset within your own home or office WiFi network. But this is pretty much an iPhone/AT&T issue, as with the likes of Android and others you may already do this.

Where there is room for improvement for carriers is a seamless hand-off between Mobile and WiFi/VoIP. As who wants to really buy a Femtocell?