Fiber is useless!
At least, that's what the Financial Director of major content player Vivendi Universal seems to think since he declared this publicly according La Tribune. Thursday night, at L’Institut de Recherche Economique et Sociales sur les Télécommunications, Philippe Caron added:
It might not seem surprising that a major content owner and record company would not like the idea of customers getting more bandwidth. What is a little bit more surprising is that Vivendi owns SFR who is currently deploying fiber to the home in France. I wouldn't like to be part of the teams in charge of that deployment right now...
The fact is that this confirms what I have long suspected, which is that apart from Free who has a clear business case for a limited fiber roll-out, none of the French players really know why they're doing it. It's copycat fiber roll-outs that were decided on the spur of the moment back in 2006. Now that the purse is tightening, they suddenly need to find reasons to slow down.
As you know, I've been studying a number of operations in the recent months and one thing that is absolutely evident is that all incumbents and most large players with established revenues don't like the idea of migrating to fiber. It's a disruptive game, and the profitable FTTH operators around the world are, for the time being, all greenfield operations.
Does this mean that I agree with Philippe Caron? I don't. There are services out there and there will be more and more in the coming months and years that leverage the capabilities of fiber. There's a paradox that I find baffling and to be fair a little disheartening in the attitude of the large telcos when it comes to service innovation. They constantly complain that the Googles and iTunes of this world are making money with their infrastructure, but when they have the potential to start innovating on services themselves, suddenly they complain that "there are no services".
Believe me, when we reach a critical mass of fttx users globally - which I estimate to be in a couple of years' time - Google et al. will launch FTTx grade services. And the telcos will yet again complain that they're not getting any money out of that...
And when that happens in France, suddenly the Philippe Caron's of this world will complain that these horrible disruptive people like Free or Lyse or KPN or HKBN or NTT or Verizon are not playing fair...
I just finished writing a Yankee Group report on Copenhagen, and one of my recommendations is "Get off of that fence!" If you think you have a clear business case to deploy FTTx, then do it. If you don't, don't pretend that you want to go when really you don't. It's unproductive for your employees, it's confusing the field and nobody stands to gain from it.
