The cover story of the Economist this week (with a typical dollop of hype called "How the internet killed the phone business") is about Skype and VOIP as a "disruptive technology" (in Clayton Christensen's sense) that is upending the wireline world but is even more of a threat to the mobile/cellular carriers. Skype has only a modest presence in the US now but the worldwide numbers are pretty staggering: Sandvine, a telecoms-equipment firm, estimates that there are 1,100 VOIP providers in America alone. But the trend is worldwide. IDC, a market-research firm, predicts that the number of residential VOIP subscribers in America will grow from 3m at the end of 2005 to 27m by the end of 2009; Japan already has over 8m subscribers today. Worldwide, according to iSuppli, a market-research firm, the number of residential VOIP subscribers will reach 197m by 2010. Even these numbers, however, do not include people using VOIP without subscribing to a service (ie, by downloading free software from Google, Skype or others). Skype alone has 54m users. http://www.economist.com/displaystory.cfm?story_id=4400704 Well, actually projected to have 54 million by December, up from about 15 million at the beginning of the year. These are the growth rates claimed for the net 10 years ago but which we knew were overblown. Of course not all of those "users" go much further than downloading something and maybe trying it out. But obviously the Bell business model is dwindling fast and the life of the network operator only gets more, um, interesting. Fred