I wonder if some of what follows is forced by what I perceived to be a rather agressively deregulated telecom market in France. What ever the reasons, this speech is quite refreshing: France Telecom at eTel: Some Telco Frankness and Initiative at Last!. Two quotes from the summary of the talk:

« The fundamental point is voice and audio now just becomes another application on the Internet »
« the other thing that occurs, particularly in this world of convergence and integration between mobile and voice in particular is that one division cannibalises another. So we can have voice over IP, but that is going to screw up the revenue that we get over mobile. The mobile guys don’t want people to adopt voice over IP or fixed line telephony. They don’t want fixed lines in people’s homes. And at the same time we want to sell them DSL…So you have this kind of internal squabble going on, which I think creates a certain amount of paralysis as well. »

It does offer a lot of cheerleading for France Telecom strategies to overcome these « problems » as a telco.