Yesterday, I was attending and speaking at the Bath Basestation and NGN Conference. I was talking about business FMC, but most of the other speakers were talking about what's happening in the mobile networks (femto, pico, LTE, etc.)
The speaker before me was Trevor Gill, a head honcho from Vodafone Group R&D. He laid the roadmap for mobile broadband capability, and something struck me suddenly: Vodafone estimates that it's network will be capable of carrying 7.4 Mb/s download by 2009 (next year!) and 40Mb/s by 2010/2011. They are seeing strong growth in adoption, and they believe they are starting to eat into the fixed broadband market.
Now that's interesting. If the promise of DSL is (as it currently is for a significant proportion of UK subscribers) 8Mb/s in the best of conditions; why wouldn't you want to go for the same levels of bandwidth over mobile ? If you're going to get the same quality of service (or lack thereof) for roughly the same price (or a little but higher currently) but with a solution that you can use virtually anywhere, why wouldn't you?
As you all know, Openreach has been reluctant so far to move into FTTx space, arguing that the costs and revenues don't match and can't match. However, unlike FT in France, KPN in the Netherlands or Telenor in Norway, Openreach doesn't face any significant competition from the fixed players in that field (although, as I argued a couple of weeks back, Virgin Media seems to be getting it's act together). If, however, mobile operators start eating into the existing broadband solutions with mobile broadband solutions - in other words, data fixed mobile substitution - that's a clear and present danger, because not only does it hurt BT Retail, but it potentially hurts BT Wholesale and Openreach at the same time.
Now some might argue, and rightly so, that the announced HSPA upgrades are not there yet. Remember though: the hottest selling gizmo in Western Europe right now is the USB modem. Sure, it's not replacing the home DSL. Yet. But if the customer experience is just as good in a couple of years, it might...
