Om has a piece that talks about the slowdown in broadband. While some may immediately run out and dump their shares, worry about their job, or predict doom and gloom, I tend to want to look at what is causing the slowdown.
1) Not much new-The delivery of the Internet to peoples homes and businesses pretty much is the same as it was in the late nineties. Sure speeds may be somewhat better, but beyond faster downloads what really have the operators, largely the telcos and cable operators delivered that’s NEW other than the cable guys selling voice. To me all they have done is gotten a customer to change who bills them for phone service and the wire that’s used to bring the phone service to the house.
2) Lack of risk taking-Not one of the cable MSO’s has done anything really risky. Heck, they haven’t even rolled out video chat between users as a standard offering with QoS. As a matter of fact, not one cable MSO or telco offers any QoS bundling.
3) No catering to the gamers–lets face it gamers are a big part of the growing base of users in the home. Yet not one of the major players has a “gamers” package with a priority “fast lane”, that lumps all the gamers traffic on to a managed sub-network, ala using a VPN, that keeps the gamers away from the execs working from home.
4) Web 2.0 Services–not one of the major telcos or MSO’s has announced any plans to develop a full blown web based consumer oriented 2.0 platform. For example, why aren’t the service providers offering a bundled back up to a service like JungleDisk, a home calendaring service for mom and dad and the kids, or a local MySpace or Facebook like social network with those companies.
5) How about distance learning platform for the schools in their areas that enables kids who are home sick to not miss school? Take some collaboration tools like Zoho or Google Apps, blend in some video conferencing ala SightSpeed, stream the classes to the kids (heck maybe a parent tunes in from time to time to see what junior is learning) and off you go.
The issue is not about broadband growth slowing, it’s a real basis marketing (or lack of marketing) issue. The players all went out and built networks that do two things-deliver email and let people surf the web. Instant Messaging is bandwidth light, so add that in. Beyond that, nothing that the telcos or the cable operators have deployed is geared for doing more than that. In many cases the speeds are not even the issue. At 5 megs symmetrical you can do a lot. At 50 megs (which I’m told will be in my Sacramento home by the end of the week from SureWest) it means just about everything is possible.
No. The issue is not growth is slowing that can impact revenues and earnings because the desire for broadband isn’t there. The truth is the telcos and the MSOs have not done any real marketing (i.e. give the customer what they want, find where those customers are, deliver what they need.) Instead what they’ve done is give their version of the Internet to us, reduced the ability to use next generation technologies (i.e. Peer2Peer blocking, packet shaping) all under the guise of “network security.”
What the telcos and cable operators need to be doing, in my opinion, roll out more options and more plans. To date they have basically been playing the game of delivering what the greatest common denominator needs and not spurred growth and development, and if anything hindered it. The time has come to have what I called “Open Net” and let the users do what the the Internet was really started for. Just about anything (legal) that can be imagined.