Old World Phone BooksOld World Phone Books

It's amazing that we are surrounded by technology that promises convergence, green benefits and better TCO but we still haven't gotten away from phone books.

Part of understanding the "going green" movement is to understand process. The old telephone books squeezed businesses for dollars for years as once the only game in town.Less than 10% of all phone books printed are recycled, 660,000 tons end up in landfills and for those not knowing where to recycle them, visit here. Anyone wishing to opt out from receiving phone books in the first place should visit here or call your phone company account reps. Making the 500 million phone books each years requires a lot of resources and about 19 million trees. It seems that are plenty of ideas of what to do with unwanted telephone books. Some argue that the phone books keep plenty of people employed while others argue that we have the Internet. In between on either side there will be lots of crowing about what's best or better and right or less impacting on the environment.

Wouldn't it be cool to have IP phones with large screens connected to a Public IP Telephone Network that could access online directories? Of course this opens up another can of worms that would mean the government wants to be involved so it can regulate, tax and spend, and it means more investment and more revenue shifts away from the PSTN, but would it be money wisely spent?

You see, the phone book argument isn't a cut and dry issue. The PSTN and analog services that are becoming cheaper seem to dictate they will be around longer than predicted. Maybe it's just going to be a natural progression towards an all IP network whether it's public or private. How long "switched" remains will be revealing. The part of business that GREEN movements don't see or appreciate is the investments of the past and what it takes in the future to move us away from those old ways of conducting business that need improving--thus phone books. Consumer and corporate greening will however demand great shifts in how we act as consumers and serve as businesses. How do we move away from printing what ends up in the landfill each year and do it in such a way that costs less and is better for the environment?

It's an amazing thing that we use all these resources from an era that most don't appreciate, and yet we are surrounded by technology that promises convergence, green benefits and better TCO but we still haven't gotten away from phone books. Of course they make great booster seats and I'll probably squawk about not having them around when they are gone. You can guess too I'll not like large screen phones that hog power. In getting back to process - why can't we just pickup the phone and type in what we are looking for and find listings in our display? Because we need PCs embedded with layers of infrastructure and floors of warm bodies to take care of the PCs just so we can do a web search and lookup the phone number we want to dial? Isn't the phone a "terminal" device? Maybe my argument isn't strong enough to move someone to build and deploy large screen IP phones to both residential and business users, especially since many users can't access enough or good-enough bandwidth. The phone book question raises plenty of other questions, especially issues and obstacles that IP telephony hasn't addressed such as "Universal Service." What happened to the "smart" in the phones anyway?It's amazing that we are surrounded by technology that promises convergence, green benefits and better TCO but we still haven't gotten away from phone books.