Jan

The Future Of Broaband and Something Of The Night

There’s an old adage about consultants that says that ‘a consultant will borrow your watch to tell you the time’. In my experience that’s pretty much on the money. They descend on you like a pack of wolves (you never get just one turn up!), devouring every morsel of information you possess. They then reformat it and crap it out their back end. And they get paid for it. I never trust them, never look into their eyes. There’s something of the night about them. Yuk.

Anyway I see that Giga Om has a guest blogger, Martin Geddes, Chief Analyst at STL Partners, architects of something called the Telco2.0 Initiative – “..a collection of research, brainstorming and consulting services designed to catalyse change in the Telco-Media-Technology value chain…”. Yeah right. And the tag line of Telco2.0 is “How to make money in an IP-based world.” – presumably consultancy is the answer.

OK so I am in danger of digressing. The point of this piece is that Martin and chums have undertaken a “major 6-month study into the future of broadband, including an online survey responded to by over 800 industry insiders, interviews with leading figures and actors in the industry, and desk research into comparable networked industries like container shipping and power distribution. ”

As a result of the study, Martin through his column on Giga Om, has shared with us 10 Things You Need To Know About The Future Of Broadband. You should visit the article to read it in full but for those of you with tight schedules here is a summary of the ten points:

1. Telecoms is about data transportation and service.

2. “Broadband is just one of many distribution systems for data”. Successful Telecoms companies will mix and match distribution ’systems’.

3. “A key enabler for this will be home hubs, media servers and set-top boxes — whoever gets to deploy and manage these boxes will emerge as the winner in the space.”

4. “Telcos will make increasing amounts of money from wholesale, not retail.”

5. ISPs are struggling to make money from simple transit.

6. “Users will increasingly buy (or use ad-funded versions of) applications with all “postage and packing” charges included, for all the networks and places they wish to use that application or content.”

7. “There will be a rapid rise of non-traditional voice services as voice is embedded into the general online experience.”

8. “Telcos will move towards “two-sided” business models, which involve not just wholesaling bulk capacity, but increased personalization of delivery to their own retail ISP end users on behalf of their “upstream” partners. ”

9. “This is part of a larger “platform” business model that involves opening up the telco to exploit underused assets.”

10. “Network neutrality is a completely mis-framed debate.”

Now, where did I put my watch?