FCC chairman Michael Powell sounded unusually intelligent during his CTIA keynote. Asked by new CTIA chairman Steve Largent about Voice Over IP, he riffed toward wisdom.

“It’s short-sighted to see Voice Over IP as another way to do something,” he said. “When you see Voice Over IP as an Internet appliation you see both the potential and the challenge. The applications change when you move from selling a service to software.”

In publishing this piece I think I learned where Powell came up with this idea. It might have been here , visiting the Wherify booth at a recent trade show.

At CTIA Powell said that, in fitting voice into a 3G data infrastructure, the wireless guys are thinking about this more than the wireline guys, but they’re still building a network utility, not applications. And complex applications demand a more complex sale than you can do on a TV spot.

This is the point Powell didn’t make, partly because as a government man it isn’t his point to make. But a computer application is fundamentally different from a voice application. There’s the whole issue of training people to use it, for one thing. The present voice channel is completely unprepared for any of this.

We need both the complexity of Microsoft, behind the screen, and the simplicity of a remote control, in front of the screen, in order to integrate voice and data into systems that deliver solutions. That’s a long sentence, one that needs to be broken down. So let me put it more simply.

The channel can’t handle what’s coming. No way, no how. We need new channels, indirect channels, channels with multiple levels, in order to get from here to there. The present telco network imperative of trying to control everything – best seen through Verizon’s “Get It Now” channel – isn’t going to deliver these computing-based applications. You need to build in margins for complex system sales, for training, for small application niches.

The present channel, in other words, works only for mass marketing. Without a channel for niche marketing, Always-On applications can't reach the U.S. market.