>I think what will eventually happen is that the traditional telco providers will gradually improve their service quality, prices and infrastructure
That's going to take a long time. Maybe 50 years? Working in the telecom business has taught me that federation has pretty ugly failure modes. The result of the structure of the telecom business has been the SIP "standard" and the horrible abuses of SS7 before that. The horrible reality of telecom is that most work is integration work. New features or similar is a secondary priority. Did you know that telecom providers actually test every single new phone on their network and add workarounds? It's the Tower of Babylon, except made from technical debt and divergence from expected behavior.
I've been thinking about this a lot, and I've arrived at an explanation: Each telecom provider is large enough to do their own development, switching costs are high, and vast majority of traffic is internally in a country. This situation incentivices creating new features and services that only need to work internally in a country or even just in a single network on a low budget using the path of least resistance (read:abuse of standards, bad solutions, technical debt). Most advanced functionality break down at country borders. For advanced functionality it's common to only support a small set of clients.
I'd suggest not waiting for Telco providers. They're going to become dumb pipes because of their incentives. Centralization works extremely well. Any decentralized network needs a lot of thought put into how it will avoid the traps of the telco industry.
That's going to take a long time. Maybe 50 years? Working in the telecom business has taught me that federation has pretty ugly failure modes. The result of the structure of the telecom business has been the SIP "standard" and the horrible abuses of SS7 before that. The horrible reality of telecom is that most work is integration work. New features or similar is a secondary priority. Did you know that telecom providers actually test every single new phone on their network and add workarounds? It's the Tower of Babylon, except made from technical debt and divergence from expected behavior.
I've been thinking about this a lot, and I've arrived at an explanation: Each telecom provider is large enough to do their own development, switching costs are high, and vast majority of traffic is internally in a country. This situation incentivices creating new features and services that only need to work internally in a country or even just in a single network on a low budget using the path of least resistance (read:abuse of standards, bad solutions, technical debt). Most advanced functionality break down at country borders. For advanced functionality it's common to only support a small set of clients.
I'd suggest not waiting for Telco providers. They're going to become dumb pipes because of their incentives. Centralization works extremely well. Any decentralized network needs a lot of thought put into how it will avoid the traps of the telco industry.