A couple of lively presentations from two distinctive players in the telco sector at the Telecommunications Summit. Duncan Blair, marketing manager from Orcon has just presented a lively session on their experience. He says his relationship with Telecom Wholesale – especially around backhaul “has been great”.
Interesting to note that Blair says what will differentiate ISPs in future, won’t be product (any ground gained there will be fleeting), but it will be about customer service – the reputation of your business.
Now its WorldxChange co owner Paul Clarkin – a provider who is going hard out providing VoIP services – over the copper and over the fibre.
Clarkin is outlining the company’s progression over five years, from choosing vendors (five) – no one vendor is the key, it’s a multi-vendor solution. It took 20 minutes for WorldxChange to switch its first VoIP call and four-and-half years to commercialize it.
Last week I wrote a blog post about a visit to the Kensington Properties FTTH pilot which prompted a bit of comment. In it I expressed concern at Cecil Alexander’s (WorldxChange’s co-owner) comments that users don’t need 100Mbps, so it’s worth summarising Clarkin’s slide on the FTTH deployment:
The case for Fibre-to-the-Home
- Future-proofed access type
- Synchronous speeds
- Capable of large bandwidth delivery
- Services such as VoIP, Internet, Video, IPTV, Security
Against Fibre-to-the-Home
- You can do all the services that fibre currently provides over DSL – and WorldxChange does (IPTV over 4.7Mbps). 10-20Mbps down to the home is all that’s needed. “Why do you need fibre?”
- The bottleneck is international capacity – Clarkin says he can connect a customer to 30Mbps to the US but it’s a cost to them of $7,500. In other words the bottleneck is not access.
- Costly backhaul.
- Not required for triple or quad play.
That’s the WorldxChange position – they’re the first to put services on a Telecom FTTH project and Clarkin says they’ve been approached by seven other developers to provide them with services over fibre infrastructure.
And interestingly, Clarkin said they use Geekzone readers to test their services. After the presentation I suggested to Clarkin that his customers were high-end users but he was clear that the services may be tested by ‘geeks’ but they are designed for general users.
So mea culpa if this general user was a little harsh about the services the other day. But I take nothing back about the need for 100Mbps from the NZ user to the world. The difference is that WorldxChange has created a business model for fibre for their company - TUANZ is creating a business case for the country.
*There’s also been some discussion on the blog about whether the Kensington Properties FTTH pilot is the fastest connection speed in NZ. Possibly more accurate to say, as David Haynes did on the blog comments, that it is the fastest connection speed on Telecom NZ’s network.