The description of the range of services to be offered sounds exactly like the Skype application offered on the iPhone. The most salient difference will be that the app will be running constantly in background on the nine devices described (which is not possible on the iPhone). It also marks the symbolic end to Verizon’s (as well as its wireless cohort’s) long-standing concern that VoIP services offered over the data link will cannibalize their core voice revenues. John Stratton, Verizon’s Chief Marketing Officer, told attendees of the Mobile World Congress that he was not concerned about either erosion of the voice traffic on its network or a decline in quality that would result from congestion caused by massive demand for Voice-over-3G.

Stratton said that the application was jointly developed from the ground up, leaving many details up for interpretation. My own belief is that the always-on Skype will be “link agile” using WiFi when available, 3G in some cases or the Verizon cell network if required to sustain qualities. At least that’s how I would architect the service given that subscribers must contract with Verizon for one of its Voice and Data plans. According to an article by Roger Chen in the Wall Street Journal, the “cheapest monthly voice plan now costs $40 for 450 minutes, and a $30 data plan is required with any smart phone.” So you may as well make the best use of all the links you can.

As for the impact on the wireless VoIP world at large, the application seems underwhelming. Sure it rattles AT&T Mobility’s cage by offering a nailed up voice-over-3G service one week after AT&T made it clear that it would continue its WiFi only approach. Yet, the range of services that are offered have an entry-level feeling to them. Meanwhile, Mobile World Congress was brimming with some really impressive X-over-wireless-IP services. Of special interest to me is a “video calling over the Internet” offered through the iTunes store by Fring and this intriguing voice-to-voice universal translator service offered by wireless personal assistant specialist VoxOx.

Harking back to my post about “satsificing”, I’m not sure that any of the services will work at high-levels of quality in all instances, but they are working well enough to make them ready for prime time.

For those of you too caught up in the world of “six sigmas” to remember Five 9’s, here’s a refresher. It is the bugaboo of every equipment vendor or service trying to win business built on “telco-grade” service level agreements “SLA’s”. In the bad old days, when all computers and switching systems had to go into those windowless “lights out” central office buildings, prospective purchasers (meaning incumbent carriers) added a little something called “NEBS-compliance” to the mix. Here’s a link to the 30-page “quality assurance” document still in use by Verizon to support “NEBS testing”. You literally have to set your product on fire and drop it out of a building to provide data on its heat dissipation, fire resistance and seismic tolerances. [It's telling that while the document has a glossary of abbreviations and acronyms covering things like CO, FTTP and the like. NEBS is never defined. FYI: it is an old Bellcore term for "Network equipment-building system" specifications.]

NEBS is an artifact of the monolithic communications industry. It was a time when the dominant, incumbent carriers had total control over the pace of innovation and introduction of new services. NEBS testing (and testing in general) often extended the time it takes to deploy new services by a factor of ten. High levels of reliability and availability took precedent over rapid and responsive introduction of new services and applications. The notion of Five 9’s comes out of this same school of thought. It refers to the number of significant digits in the measure of computer system and network uptime. Five 9’s is 99.999% availability. In any given year (which equates to 525,600 minutes) Five 9’s equates to a little more than 5 minutes).

Think of that the next time Facebook freezes, Gmail is unavailable, or the “Fail Whale” appears as you try to take a Tweet break. Heck, think of it as you make sense of a slightly mangled transcription of a recently received voicemail message. My point is not to defend such failures, but to point out that we end-users (well, at least my “sample of one”) would rather live with these minor mishaps than do without new services altogether. The speed at which new applications and services are introduced and how they evolve over-the-top of IP-based networks is both dazzling and beneficial to end users.

Today’s world of telco mashups and telephony API’s is built on “Four 9’s” at best and, in the case of speech-to-text transcription, something on the order of 85% recognition rates (with human intervention as a frequent fallback). On smartphones, mobile apps fail routinely. People are accustomed to dropped calls and the occasional need to “reboot” their mobile devices. In spite of such shortcomings, or perhaps because of them, mobile subscribers feel more attached to their devices than ever before. Going mobile has a more daring, game-like quality to it because of a certain amount of risk-taking and improvisation.

As we enter the second decade of the new millennium, mobile mashups are more popular than ever and the world is on the threshold of high adoption rates for voice command, voice search and message dictation. The fun is just beginning. And, in no small way, we owe it all to the End of Five 9’s.

The claim is a bit overblown. What they mean to say is that after pressing 10 buttons to tap out 888-DROID DO (888-376-4336), you’ll be able to speak your query terms for interpretation by the speech recognition resources of Google Mobile Search. It’s part of an advertising and promotional campaign whereby Verizon will use the digital billboards that light up time square to prompt passers-by to dial the toll-free number “search for practically anything” and then see the results illustrated on those digital billboards rendered in Google Maps.

According to this post by Dan Frommer in Silicon Valley Insider, the companies launched the service earlier this month to coincide with the general availability of Motorola’s Droid in retail stores. They didn’t take into account the Yankees’ World Series Victory Parade, so it was sparsely attended, making it the perfect shake-down cruise for the service. On November 27 (Black Friday) the billboards will be up and operating at 6 AM and stay active until 3 AM the following morning.

While it is touted as a promotion for all things Droid, it amounts to a highly visible showcase for speech-enabled, multimodal mobile search. It embraces spoken input of query terms and visual rendering of results. Now all we have to do is convince the general public that they don’t have to book all the digital signage in Time Square to use their voice to get turn-by-turn directions on their mobile phones.

Vonage, and its charismatic CEO/Founder Jeff Citron, had always relied on innovation to differentiate itself from other carriers. It introduced a voicemail-to-text transcription service in 2007 ago under the name “Vonage Text”, reportedly turning to Simulscribe (now called PhoneTag) as a service provider. At the time it charged $0.25 for each transcribed message. The deal clearly was not an “exclusive”; one of PhoneTag’s long-time differentiators was its claim of being carrier-independent. Indeed, earlier this year in a press release, SpinVox claimed to be “live” with the following carriers around the world: Alltel, Cincinnati Bell, Sasktel, Rogers Wireless, Telus, Telstra, Vodacom South Africa, Vodafone Spain, Movistar Chile, Skype, Vonage and Livejournal.

All the while, Vonage must have been trialing Nuance’s voicemail-to-text service for introduction as the “Visual Voicemail” element of its $24.99 montly flat rate “Vonage World” service plan. Vonage subscribers without the Vonage World plan can have voicemail transcribed for the going rate of $0.25 per message. There is a lot of wisdom in offering voicemail transcription as part of a flat-rate plan. I’ve been trialing the Nuance voicemail-to-text for about a year now (along with several others). In general the service is very good and accurate enough, but there are always utterances that are out-of-grammar or not rendered correctly. This is true of Google Voice, SpinVox, PhoneTag and even high cost transcription services. We all need editors.

Offering the service at no extra cost, as part of a premium VoIP service plan takes away some of the pricing friction and high expectations that accompany a premium service. It is definitely time for the services out to a broader population so they can get a feeling for when it works well and when it needs work. This is part of a socialization process that every new technology should go through. Get it into the hands of more people so that they can decide whether they will use it and then define the “when” and “how” they will use it.