I’m alone in thinking that Bell’s decision to use VoIP on it’s backbones or offer VoIP services to customers should be no big deal. It was all over the radio and the papers this morning. I guess it’s mostly because it involves Nortel.

Meanwhile, Businessweek reports that Vonage would rather forget about telecom regulations altogether, branding them as irrelevant.

I don’t have any clear ideas on how consumer VoIP could or should be regulated, but I do feel the current landscape does not allow for sufficient quality and accountability, on the part of both access providers and service providers to offer a solid alternative to the traditional POTS. Are the actual regulations appropriate? Most likely no. But an absence of regulation of a critical infrastructure element, either because of planning, ignorance or by omission, will not serve the consumers and the market well. Kevin Werbach seems to come to the same conclusions: this issue needs some rational policy making now.

Update: Chalk up one vote against regulation from Net2Phone’s CEO in that Cnet article. He does seem to accept that once VoIP is not considered a nascent business anymore, some regulatory attention will be inevitable, at the demand of the LECs.