Fiberevolution

At the FTTH Council Europe conference in London, I presented the results of a study commissioned by the Council on the benefits of FTTH deployment for real-estate players. 8 real-estate companies were interviewed extensively to understand how they viewed FTTH, having deployed it, and if they perceived benefits in integrating FTTH in the properties they build or manage. The results of this study will be presented in a webinar organised by the council on April 18th at 11 AM CET. If the topic is of interest to you, please register here.

I have in the past been very vocal about the need to understand FTTH and LTE in symbiosis. I was therefore quite pleased and interested to read the following interview of Suresh Sidhu, CCO of Celcom Axiata Berhad in Malaysia where he says (amongst other things): “FTTH is key to meeting business and consumer needs”. In a nutshell, the mobile arm of the Malaysian Incumbent TM does not think next-generation wireless and FTTH are antithetical, quite the contrary.

The interviewer (who seems to doubt the benefits of wireline connectivity) drives the following exchange:

As next-gen wireless services develop will there be a need for fixed-line services in five years’ time?

We see that the customers we serve are changing their behaviour from “walk and talk” to “sit and play”. Or rather – “walk somewhere, sit, play, walk somewhere else, sit, play”. Critical to this value proposition is the ability for wireless service providers to be present at the key “data hotspots” which could be home, cafes or the traditional street locations. We believe that LTE, HSPA+ and HetNets (including femtocells, WiFi, etc.) are key to serving this need. However, the best way forward may well be to seek convergent approaches that include the fixed world as well. People will do different things at different locations and a holistic relationship will drive both wireless and fixed technologies to develop their niches.

I’ll let you read the rest of the interview here.

I have great news to share with you today: Eurotelcoblog, the original disruptive telecom blog that inspired so many (myself included) is back!

James Enck posted a very interesting entry today (peppered with his usual sharp wit) about value perception in the broadband market, arguing that customer perceptions are largely skewed when it comes to the relative value of broadband and other goods and services (including POTS line rental). The post is entitled Value Perceptions and is well worth a read.

I fully agree that this situation opens up opportunities for disruptive positioning, and this ties back to my earlier blog post on Technically Speaking about the Innovator’s Dilemna in the broadband market. It’s a sad truth of our market that few players dare to be disruptive, even if they are poised to benefit the most from turning the tables on legacy players. Who is going to educate the customers on the value of high quality broadband if not them?

I have been invited to contribute my thoughts to the Technically Speaking blog edited and moderated by the excellent Gareth Spence. My first contribution went up yesterday under the title of Scarcity is the Achilles’ Heel of Legacy Broadband. I’m going to try and make these on a regular basis; they will at times move into tech territories that I don’t normally dwell in, but that’s a good thing, I think!

(Oh, and if you don’t know why apples and oranges, well… I’m not sure I do either!)

There are so many ways in which the internet has changed our lives, both personal and professionals. Opportunities have been created, legacy businesses have been displaced. The rate at which this transformation is happening can seem mind boggling, and there seems to be a general tendancy now by large established businesses and even governments to “fight back”. One way the fight is taking shape is restrictions of our individual liberties, and denial of the ability of each and everyone to go online and benefit from whatever opportunities the internet has to offer.

I don’t know if David Isenberg would agree with that, but it seems to me that defending the continued ability to reap these benefits is at the heart of what Freedom to Connect is about. F2C is not an event amongst many with a few interesting talks drowned in vendor sales pitches. It’s a unique opportunity to hear radical thoughts from speakers who are more passionate than they are interested. Last year, I was privileged to hear the late Aaron Swartz talk about how the fight against SOPA/PIPA was won, a lesson both in activism and in internet collaboration. You don’t hear speeches like that every day. In fact, you’re lucky to hear that once in a lifetime.

This year (March 4 & 5, 2013), David’s done it again. His program includes such luminaries as Vint Cerf, Jeff Jarvis, Peter Cochrane and Guardian journalist Glenn Greenwald. Trust me though, as important as those people are, the true gem of F2C is discovering the new brightest brains of the internet era; the young people whose name may mean nothing to us today but will be the makers of tomorrow’s connected world. That’s what I will miss the most this year, because sadly I can’t attend Freedom to Connect.

But if you can, you should. Especially if it’s not a 6000 mile ride for you too.

Before the municipal event organised by SKL in Brussels last Thursday I did a quick interview on Stokab which has been put up over the week-end.

You can see it here:

As mentioned previously, this relates to our recent study and white paper on Stokab.

Flowing Water (CC) bcimet

Martin Geddes is one of the smartest brains in the business, and a good friend. That doesn’t stop us from disagreeing on a number of things (business related), the chief one being the notion that internet in general and IP routing specifically are broken and need fixing. That being said, and while I’m open to hearing any well constructed argument – even those I think I’ll disagree with – I never understood the technology reasoning behind that assertion of his, and that made it hard for me to translate it into a business reasoning.

The excellent video interview of Martin over at Br0kenTeleph0n3 has changed this. It is rather overdramatically entitled How to avoid the coming broadband catastrophe but is well worth 10 minutes of your time nonetheless.

The core of the argument as I understand it is that bandwidth needs are fluid, and bandwidth itself is only one (and maybe not the most important) component of the broadband experience. Therefore by offering speed as the only service differentiator, and the same speed to one customer all the time, broadband access providers are shooting themselves in the foot and missing out on the real business opportunity.

I find myself, therefore, in agreement with the core tenet if that is indeed what it is. I’m assuming there’s a depth of technical reasoning below that that I have no chance in hell of grasping, but that hardly matters to me as long as I understand the business consequences. So that leads me to a few points of mild disagreement and a few comments on implications:

• The title of the article is overdramatic, and indeed Martin’s own speech is overdramatizing because service providers are not dying. As I mentioned before, I’m myself often guilty of treating the service providers as companies who are suffering in my own writing. Because the goggles through which they view the world are so antiquated, because they repeatedly do stupid things that are clearly not in their best interests, because the innovators in the market are no longer the service providers, etc. But that doesn’t make them a dying breed, and in fact the notion that they’re in dire straits is not supported by their financial performance. So I think we should be careful about not painting proposed solutions as “saves”, just as radical improvements.

• Martin is indeed right that the issue is a mindframe issue. It’s not necessarily that people within these organisations don’t understand the argument. The technical people probably will, the marketing people will struggle (but if I can get it, surely they will). It’s that they consider the way the internet market works to be beyond their grasp. In his interview, Martin doesn’t touch much on the ecosystem implications of the changes he’s proposing, and implicitly suggests that service providers have full end-to-end control of the traffic they receive and send. That’s not the case (and I know he doesn’t think that) but it’s going to be one of the main objections to changing the way things are done.

• The final point I’d like to make is that while there are no doubt ways to improve customer experience (and monetize that improvement), it’s easy – perhaps too easy – to read that as “there’s no issue in the access network”. In fact at one point in the interview Ian Grant tries to get Martin to comment on BT’s FTTC investment, and to his credit, Martin dodges the bullet by stating that that’s an infrastructure consideration. The question ultimately is: will the proposed changes in traffic management and monetization improve the performance enough to meet the challenges of demand in the next few years. I have a hard time believing that, so I don’t think it’s an either/or proposition, but here my own biases may be showing.

Hong-Kong Broadband Network’s NiQ Lai is one of the most fascinating executives in the broadband space, and listening to him explain HKBN’s approach is always full of insights.

This video interview was done by futurist Anders Sorman-Nilsson and though it’s only 10 minutes long, it’s full of nuggets.

My favourite bit is this one:

If you look at the airline industry, every airline can buy planes from the same suppliers, Airbus and Boeing. But the difference between a great carrier and poor carrier is not the hardware, it’s the people that run it. The reliability is not based on the hardware, it’s the maintenance team. The service experience is not the hardware, it’s the crew. And that’s how we see it.

I think this alone explains a large part of HKBN’s success. It’s sadly not something I see replicated with many broadband providers worlwide, who obsess on hardware choices and mess up distribution or customer service…

We published a report last year on HKBN which is still very much current, if you’re interested in exploring their model in more depth.

In 2009, I was lucky and flattered enough to be invited to speak at Freedom to Connect, the telecom policy organised in Washington DC by David Isenberg. David's events are always wonderful, thought propoking and very networking friendly, but this year's Freedom to Connect (more familiarly known as F2C) looks to be a killer one. It comes at a very appropriate time when the struggle around network neutrality has moved beyond parliaments and courts into the realm of devious circumvention mechanisms and the fragmentation of internet ecosystems (see Doc Searl's excellent post on the topic yesterday.)

I don't know if I'll be able to attend. May is a complicated time for me with lots of international travels, and it's unclear wether I'll be able to free myself without encurring the wrath of my spouse and children. If I can make it though, I will, and so should you. I will let David speak of the program in his own words: 

People of the Internet,

I'm delighted to announce that F2C: Freedom to Connect will occur on May 21 and 22, 2012, in the Washington, DC area, see http://freedom-to-connect.net for details.

 F2C: Freedom to Connect is devoted to preserving and celebrating the essential properties of the Internet, which is a success today because it is stupid, abundant and simple. In other words, the Internet's neutrality, its openness to rapidly developing technologies and bottom-up innovation, and its publicly specified layered architecture are the reasons it has succeeded where others (e.g., ISDN, Interactive TV) have failed.

The Freedom to Connect is about an Internet that supports democracy rather than erodes it. It is held in Washington, DC because the Internet's issues and its activists are under-represented in federal policy circles. We can't afford slick lobbyists and expensive PR campaigns. F2C: Freedom to Connect is designed to advocate for innovation, for creativity, for expression, for self-determination, from the bottom up.

Speakers at this year's F2C: Freedom to Connect include: Vint Cerf, Internet pioneer, Internet Evangelist at Google, Cory Doctorow, science fiction author, co-founder BoingBoing, Rebecca MacKinnon, author, 'Consent of the Networked' and co-founder, Global Voices, Eben Moglen, Software Freedom Law Center, and many others, details at http://freedom-to-connect.net.

As in previous years, F2C: Freedom to Connect will feature great music, good food, and an awesome audience. Early bird registration is in effect through March 15.

I should point out, because these things always come up, that I'm not getting paid, bribed, lobbyed or otherwise influenced to recommend this event to you: it really is a must attend if open internet ecosystems and their preservation matter to you.

Jean-Michel Billaut is a landmark figure of the French tech scene. One of the early adopters of all things internet in the 90s, he was instrumental in creating a corporate perception of innovation and its value when he was working in the banking industry back then, and became a visible and valuable presence through the video-interviews that he publishes on the Billautshow.

Last week I had a very candid and direct discussion with him about fiber to the home, whether it’s the only path to high speed internet, the drivers of various players to initiate or accomplish the access network revolution and the broadband situation in France.

The video-interview is in French, of course, so I apologise to those who won’t be able to enjoy it. I really don’t have the time to subtitle the whole thing…

La fibre dans le monde from Jean Michel Billaut on Vimeo.