Convergence Conversation

Yesterday was a long day for me, I was presenting the results of a study to a customer and talked for nearly 6 hours straight. You would have thought that, sitting in the airport with a 3 hour wait ahead of me I would stay away from work related topics. But I had my ipad with me, the wifi was pretty decent (if expensive) and my twitter stream was yelling at me that Steve Jobs was announcing lots of really cool stuff.

So I plugged into the live stream of the Apple conference (not that good in terms of quality, or rather, really good when it worked, but it didn't work all that often...) and listened to Steve Jobs explaining in his low key manner how he was going to destroy the business model of a few other players in the industry. More...

In an era where the buzzwords about broadband and the internet seem to be caps and hogs, it's reassuring and exciting to see someone trying to buck the trend and offer what customers want as opposed to what he thinks customers should get.

Seen from the outside, the US market is often considered to be a static duopoly, but clearly there are still interesting initiatives out there (in addition to municipal fiber, of course) to try and break the mold. I’m really excited therefore to present the following interview with Sonic.net CEO Dane Jasper. When European style disruption hits the Californian shores. More...

I have been given a new position within Yankee Group, that of Director, Access Research. What this means operationally is that I will be coordinating a team of analysts covering a variety of topics related to access networks, both wireline and wireless. I will also continue to be an analyst myself, of course, there's no such thing as a manager only in this business (and that's fine by me!)

What I find interesting and challenging intellectually is that this will allow me to bridge the confrontational view of wireline vs. wireless which I keep hearing about despite my thinking it's absurd. I hope to muster some of the brain power on the wireless side to try and look more comprehensively at how the access network will evolve organically on both sides as this seems to me the only way that it makes sense for the access network to evolve. More...

France has long been considered to be one of the places in the world where you could get the best value for money when it comes to broadband. It's very likely that the summer of 2010 will mark a change in that respect.

In quick succession, at the end of August, we learn that:

To accomodate EU regulation, the VAT rate of triple-play will have to increase. It seems that triple-play being a combination of services that are taxed at different rates was split in half until now (half of the service was taxed at 5.5% and half at 19.6%.) According to the French government the EU is banging on the table saying that's a preferential treatment and everything should be taxed at 19.6%. More...

I tried to disconnect from work related topics on my vacation as much as I could. I didn't post on this blog, I only superficially followed what was happening on the various tech mailing lists I participate in, etc.

There's one topic that I couldn't shut out though and that was the impact of the result of the Australian national elections on the NBN. That topic made it into the mainstream press here in France, and so I couldn't help but think about it.

Ironically, during the last few days of the campaign, someone on the Fiberevolution mailing list pointed to an interesting editorial by Paul Krugman in the NYT related to government and infrastructure, and I thought these two seemingly different topics regarding two different countries were really one and the same. More...

Photo by B. Felten / Photoshop by http://portucareto.blogspot.com/

During a conversation last week, someone in the industry reported to me that a mutual acquaintance (also in the industry) saw me as an 'open access freak'. For some reason, that disturbed me a little. I don't have any qualms about being associated with Open Access, but the term freak suggests that my views on this issue aren't entirely rational. Actually it suggests that they are entirely not rational, and I think I take exception to that.

So I thought as this is likely to be my last post in a while (I'm leaving for the South of France on holiday soon) that I would try and summarize my views on open access and (hopefully) stress the rational thought process that leads me to general support open access policies and initiatives. More...

The webinar that Yankee Group held today with myself and my colleagues Camille Mendler and Declan Lonergan was very well attended, and I decided to share the replay with you here. It's all very interesting (I think) but for those interested mostly in issues covered by this blog, you will find here some research related to a number of recurrent topics, namely what would happen if Google shared some of its revenues with telcos, how collaborative network deployment models might work and how demand for fiber services might be kickstarted.

Ericsson announced this morning that it has won one of the largest deals for deployment of GPON in India with Radius Infratel. I talked about their collaborative pilot project in the past but it was hard at that time to look at this as more than a drop in the ocean. In the 18 months since this pilot was launched, Radius Infratel has confirmed the viability of their model and - perhaps more importantly - has proven that an offering to landlords combined with an open access service model could be designed to get real estate people on board.

The result of this is the announcement we heard about this morning, that Ericsson won a deal for a 600k household deployment of GPON in India with Radius Infratel. More...

This is kind of last minute, but I wanted to mention that in a couple of hours Yankee Group will be holding a free webinar on the topic of Telco Growth. Here is the official presentation:

Will wireless kill wireline vendors? Will Google kill telcos? What is next-gen? The idea of strategic growth conjures up dozens of questions—and no specific answers. Mobile traffic is rising, and consumers and enterprises are constantly demanding more bandwidth, content and speed. The communications industry must work to keep up by both evolving traditional business models and building the capacious, ubiquitous network needed to satisfy demand.