In the process of researching an article on carrier success stories I interviewed a really interesting executive with Partech International (a venerable, global investment house) by the name of Tim Wilson. Due to word count limitations, I wasn't able to include his comments in the final edit. So I wanted to summarize some of his thoughts here. Tim has a sterling resume including stints at Lucent and Digital Island and even AT&T Bell Labs. Now his firm does not invest in WISPs. Rather they invest in the technologies that could support VoIP delivery. To begin with I am very interested in voice nowadays because I am working on a white paper on the subject for the Applications Working Group. It is geared around "best practices" for carriers. So I am taking articles on VoIP and talking to everyone I can. "I see voice becoming very cheap and companies making money off of additional services," said Tim Wilson, partner with Partech. "Voice is however still an application people will pay for." He talked about how the emergence of VoIP reflects pricing problems that carriers have. Early on, telecom network capacity really wasn't there to deliver IP voice or manage it. In fact it was really only with the 90's buildout of capacity that data networks got uncrowded enough to support buffers for example that could manage VoIP elements such as jitter. But ultimately what this meant was it became cheap enough to deliver VoIP that carriers could begin to shift some of this traffic.   He really does see additional services as the moneymaker of the future which much mirrors my thoughts. A great conversation with someone really knowledgeable. Thanks Tim. Tim Sanders tim@thefinalmile.net   www.thefinalmile.net   www.wimaxglobalnews.com