Nice rant on how "circuit-switched" thinking is holding back advancement in telephony:
Assume a phone call requires an (extremely generous) 3Kb per second of audio. One hour of stored audio is about 10Mb of data. This is a pretty modest amount by the standards of modern flash memeory. Your mobile phone is perfectly capable of storing all your voicemail. The network is perfectly capable of transmitting the data in a sensible amount of time. Unlike email, most voicemail is listened to — the amount of wasted download is small…
You should be able to listen to voicemails on your plane journey home. You should be able to reply to them on a store-and-forward basis, even when you're not connected to the network. And most of all, you shouldn't have to use a clunky telephony user interface to navigate a message queue. And you shouldn't be restricted to one device for accessing your own data.
(via Werblog)
