Hey y’all, I’m back. So anyway. We all know that wireless is dragging on wireline revenue, but Anton Wahlman and Eric Kainer over at ThinkPanmure believe that the Medusa-like head of Skype might be another, maybe bigger threat to incumbents. In fact, they think that as we speak — err, type — a global consortium of incumbents is conspiring to launch a Skype competitor. It will be a Perseus to fight competition, I suppose.

Wow, really? It’s all very secret society. That said, before we discount that such an Illuminati-like group exists, consider that ThinkPanmure tends to get some pretty juicy information (like the rumor that AT&T Inc. has signed a deal with ip.access for millions of femtocells. Hot gossip!). So, let’s look further:

“We believe that AT&T, in conjunction with perhaps 10 to 15 other incumbent operators such as British Telecom, Deutsche Telekom and NTT, is preparing to launch, in 2009, a competitor of sorts to Skype,” the dynamic duo write. “We believe that the motivation to do this would be to keep subscribers from completely disappearing, reducing win-back marketing costs.”

Hmm, well, yes, there’s a point there. If you can’t beat them, join them?

They go on to note that incumbents are supplanting the lost wireless revenue with other services, but: “The loss of the long-time telephone number often means that the incumbent phone operator loses the relationship with the customer entirely. Why? Because the consumer can buy access for his VoIP service such as Skype from another source, such as a cable modem, 3G cellular, WiMAX, or a competitive DSL/fiber carrier. If this happens, the cost to win back this subscriber can be disproportionately high, if it does ever occur.”

Ohhhhhhhh. I get it now: this is coming from dumb pipe fears, plus the inability to leverage the customer relationship to sell in other services.

They go on to elaborate on how it would work: “The service would be free when calling any other subscriber of the consortium, consisting of perhaps 10 to 15 incumbent carriers around the world. We believe the likely hook for the consumer would be that you have to buy your access service, such as DSL, fiber or, for that matter, 3G, from the incumbent. That way, the incumbent, while losing some telephone revenue, can use the power of the DSL line to upgrade the customer to IPTV or to add one or more cellular subscriptions down the road.”

I’m sure they know something (many things — who is their Deep Throat??) that TaraBytes is not knowing of. But my initial analysis of this yields two questions. First of all, considering that the open access drumbeat is getting louder and louder (with AT&T and Verizon Communications Inc. both on board), and with WiMAX on the way thanks to the Sprint spinoff of Xohm, we’re transitioning to a third-party application plus non-carrier-locked consumer electronics model anyway. Might take a while, but we’ll get there. So the value proposition for the carrier will lie in leveraging the information it holds in its network — what was accessed when and where and by whom and where did they go from there? — in order to enable other people’s applications to be more effective. It will lie in providing targeted advertising based on that same network information, creating new revenue from that. It will lie in providing reliability and call quality in the transport layer. And also the differentiation lies in enabling fixed-mobile convergence and the ability to tie services to a person, not a device — porting apps and content around to several different screens (and hey, isn’t that an AT&T thing?). Skype can’t do that without the cooperation of the carrier. So ... in that scenario, launching one’s own free talk service seems like a nice thing to do, but not a necessary one.

The second question I have is, an incumbent version of Skype wouldn’t be a BYO access offering, obviously, would it? Does that mean the call quality would be better? Or could be better? Just akin to digital voice from Comcast? In that scenario, the free calling to other countries thing is niiiiice — all the cheap, none of the echoes. And wouldn’t that cannibalize, become the death wish of, what landline voice they have left (not to mention eroding wireless service revenue too). In other words, why would they want to develop a talk-for-free app if revenue is already suffering? Maybe I have that figured wrong, or maybe I’m just a Chicken Little type, but it seems risky.

What do you think? And do you have any information about this (or any other juicy topics? Come, on, throw me a bone)? If so, e-mail me at tseals@vpico.com.