I’ve been dosing up big time on fibre, and its incredibly energising.
Last week I went to Local Government NZ’s Broadband Forum in Wellington – an impressive 2-day gathering organised with strong support from Internet NZ. There was a huge buzz. Around 200-300 people, all of them concerned about telecommunications and motivated to find creative ways to step up. Great sessions, well informed people, a strong sense of purpose, and relentless determination.
Local government gets it. Proper telecomms is crucial to regional New Zealand. Leaving it in the lap of the carriers is not going to result in the sense of urgency we need to catch up the rest of the developed world.
Then today I’ve been in Manchester in northern England, talking to the city folk who are well advanced in a municipal network here. There’s a missionary zeal – a fervour about these people too. Its like fibre networks, or in this case fibre and wireless networks, have become a new religion. The people who understand the potential this technology has to improve our workplaces and lives are truly passionate. They want results now. I’m betting they’ll achieve just that.
Then, Monday coming I’ll be on a similar fact finding trip in Amsterdam. I know pretty much what I’ll find – I’ve talked to the Amsterdam folks before and done quite a lot of desk research. Amsterdam is arguably the world leader in this stuff with around 40,000 homes connected to a municipal network, but a lot of other cities in Europe, Canada and elsewhere are close behind.
So why is local government involved, and what does it mean for the telcos?
Simply put, the character of telecommunications is changing dramatically. In the past it was a game for heavyweight players. Scale was everything. Phone companies were the biggest kids on the block, and developed a habit of throwing their weight around as big boys do.
Fibre optic changes all that. Now you don’t have to huge to be a telco. There’s now a DIY option.
In the UK, British Telecom was uninterested in offering DSL to rural dwellers unless a cluster of 200 signed up in any location. So a whole lot of communities went out and got enough signed, And then, guess what. Instead of going to BT retail for the services, the communities went to BT Wholesale and bought the services in bulk. Bingo – a warm welcome to the community phone company.
So if I was one of the old incumbents, built on a culture of sweating assets and rationing innovation, I’d be very, very, very concerned right now. The paradigm has changed. The balance of power is moving dramatically towards the customer. Life is never going to be the same again. And if they leave it too late to become part of this movement it may be just that – too late.
Exciting times! You bet! I’ll write some more after Amsterdam next week.