It’s a cliché often repeated by mobile industry followers; that voice would one day become a commodity and even possibly free.

I’ve been hearing such statements for years now and it hasn’t happened yet. Phone bill has remained relatively stable all this while and I don’t expect to wake up any day soon to learn that my service provider has made all calls free.

It would be a dream come true but there’s no way that Maxis, Celcom, DiGi or UMobile will do this anytime soon. Not unless they want to commit suicide. Right to this day, most of their revenues (and profits) come from voice calls.

This Sunday, I joined what must have been the majority of Malaysians in following the results of the Hulu Selangor by-election.  The whole day long, I sought out reports of how the polling was going on. After 5 pm, I eagerly consumed every report that I found which shared updates of unofficial vote counts as they trickled into the counting station.

In mid December 2009, Singapore’s telecommunications services regulator, Infocomm Development authority (IDA) released new guidelines pertaining to telecommunications services contracts ( http://bit.ly/6rUaBN )

Briefly, IDA moved to limit contracts to 24 months and more importantly, asked service providers to do away with fixed early termination charges (ETC) and instead, adopt a system where ETC is calculated based on the remaining contract period.

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