Telephony 2.0

 Update: Listen to a podcast interview with Jaxtr’s Taneli Otala.

The post title here poses a question and the answer is probably obvious — IP-based voice communications today is all about software.

So it shouldn’t come as a surprise that Jaxtr — which today announced it has grown ten-fold from half a million to 5 million active users of its call-back voice over IP service in just over five months — has hired Taneli Otala, the former chief technology officer of open source database provider MySQL, as VP of engineering to help it expand its “network.”

I put network in quotes because what Jaxtr and its rivals offer is certainly a step removed from traditional telco networks and even P2P networks like Skype. In a nutshell, Jaxtr buys up a bunch of local phone numbers to fuel a call-back service that combines local PSTN-driven calling with the shuttling of the long-distance legs of those connections over the Internet. That combination makes most sense for international dialing, where per-minute prices are still high — and explains why almost 85% of Jaxtr’s users are from outside the U.S.

Jaxtr offers some bells and whistles — like Web-embeddable call widgets and advanced call handling — but really it’s the numbers game (price) which is driving its numbers growth (users).

We’re hoping to talk with MySQL’s Otala once he settles in. For now, Otala gave a statement describing the challenge he faces at Jaxtr:

Whether it takes Jaxtr another 140 days or a year to grow its membership yet again 10-fold to 50 million, we are designing a unique system that can handle such unprecedented growth.

Jaxtr runs its VoIP service on a cluster of Linux servers running MySQL and has been scouring the Web for MySQL admins, with Otala noting as he comes in the door: “We are hiring on all fronts.”

We talked with Jaxtr CEO (and LinkedIn co-founder) Konstantin Guericke about the addition of Otala. “[Jaxtr] is more of a Web company than anything else,” he said. “We use existing pipes to route traffic; voice traffic doesn’t hit our server at all, we just manage the signaling.”

Guericke noted that a system like Jaxtr’s really brings together the Web and telecom worlds in a whole new way. “It’s a very interesting time in telecom,” he added.

We teased this issue a bit in our recent news story on new social network VoIP services — VoIP Goes Social — but voice over IP pioneer Tom Evslin goes all philosophical on us to get at the underpinnings of this trend.

In a recent post (The Third Stage of the VoIP Rocket Never Fired), Evslin notes the 10-year anniversary of VoIP, details his three VoIP predictions from the early days (pricing arbitrage, particularly for international rates; voice as one of many data types; and VoIP as new service enabler) and says the first two came true but the third did not. Or at least it hasn’t yet. He points to services like Vonage and today’s IP PBXs and VoIP handsets and notes that while they do a great job of replicating plain old telephone service, they don’t offer anything new.

However, he sees the fulfillment of VoIP’s promise in the integration of voice and the Web, particularly into (but not limited to) emerging social networks and Web-based services:

There is no third stage of VoIP as an incremental improvement on POTS (Plain Old Telephone Service). Instead there is a whole new way to communicate. POTS won’t be improved; it’ll just be replaced. The rearguard action fought by traditional phone companies will eventually result in their over-priced and underperforming voice services being replaced and abandoned since they aren’t being improved (unless those companies can control the Internet – that’s a big unless).

In the new communication world – which is already forming inside social networks – live voice and voice mail are just two on a continuum of choices people have for communicating with each other. Video’s a choice; so is text and email and still pictures. Communication can be live and real-time; it can be slightly async like texting; or seriously async like email. The modes of communication mix freely. Two or more people using different devices communicate at the highest common denominator rather than the lowest.

And there are no more phone numbers, just names and handles (made up names). There’s no more great directory in the sky; there’s the union of the directories of the social networks we use and our personal directories. We’ll know who’s “calling” us as surely as we know whom we’re calling (callerID today tells you where a call is made from, not who is making it).

One final interesting question is the concept of “place.” In the landline world, you call someone’s *place* — their home, their office, etc. With the growth of social-networks-as-a-business, will we have to go to a social network to reach someone? If you know your Internet history, the obvious answer is no. Open and interconnected will win. Closed and artificially constricted will lose. And that includes Facebook and MySpace, which long-term will likely have more in common with AOL than with Google. Or, as Evslin says:

“I’m in the such-and-such network on FaceBook or I’m a fellow online Rotarian” are relevant uses of cybergeography. But friends lists won’t stay restricted to single social networks like FaceBook or MySpace for long.

There’s a lot to chew on here….but the main point is that all of this will happen organically — indeed it already is. Young people don’t beg for a phone line in their room anymore, as the cliche goes; they’ve got their cell phone. And they don’t even use email that much anymore — it’s IM, though that tends to skew younger, typically replaced by SMS and now Facebook walls. Which of course will be replaced by something else again.

None of which will smell, feel or be priced like POTs ever again.