Last Wednesday, the FCC released its eagerly awaited order addressing Comcast’s network management practices, lately the subject of considerable speculation and debate. At 67 odd pages, the item takes some time to digest, in detail, but essentially the agency agreed with the various complainants that Comcast had degraded specific applications used by consumers for sharing large video files (called “peer-to-peer” technologies, or “P2P” for the acronym-obsessed telecom industry).
The debate mentioned above included a number of public hearings featuring a wide array of industry representatives, members of the public, and members of Congress, the first of which was held in Boston, Massachusetts, in late February of this year. The FCC's order cites some interesting observations made by engineers at that particular hearing, discussing how Comcast seemed to be making value judgments about customers or holding hostile perceptions of other segments of the industry as potential enemies.
I seem to recall these comments (at this hearing) continuing, though, and suggesting instead another approach, encouraging carriers and applications providers to look for allies or potential business partners amongst the mix, as perhaps providing a more useful guide. This approach would tend to unite rather than divide the carrier segment, applications, services and content communities, and users too. Said another way, there is a cycle of innovation, which requires investment all around, and spawns new innovations, with the time for development cycles being continually compressed.
Verizon Wireless made this exact point late last November when announcing its Open Development Initiative.
In this regard, I note that Friday’s Wall Street Journal’s front page features an article about Verizon Wireless and Google in talks about forming a partnership to simplify the search options for users of mobile devices. I’m all for simplicity and connectivity, and who isn’t? There are an awful lot of details on the way to Simplicity, though, with more twists and turns than anyone could ever predict. Here is Network World's take on what it means for consumers.
Like telephone carriers offering consumers home computer troubleshooting services, over the phone. This service works because the law of averages and mechanics dictates that most technical problems are relatively simple to diagnose and repair: Average Mechanics everywhere agree that hooking up the right cables or wires can have a dramatic effect on performance.
Recall also that, at one time, Hollywood tried to kill the nascent VCR industry, only later to become utterly dependent upon the home market for additional (or primary?) revenues to rescue Box Office Bomb. How about that dire prediction (or production) veering wildly off the mark?
Broadband access networks form a mosaic of technologies (such as fiber, copper, various flavors of wireless) deployed by the various carriers (or even by a single carrier where a particular technology makes sense), and these dissimilar technologies present different strengths and weaknesses, over which consumers may access an incredible array of applications, services, and content: this indicates a fluent, vibrant marketplace, one still very much in the making. So I'd agree with those comments made in February, that new business models mean new business partners.
Last week’s FCC ruling that Comcast secretly degraded peer-to-peer applications used by consumers to share video files was a noteworthy event, and there have been numerous articles discussing said same. It's almost a summer's worth of reading in one complex move.
It’s not everyday that you catch the smartest folks in the business fully engaged in head-scratching mode, though, but I guess some of that is inevitable when one is faced with rapidly changing business models.
I can’t help but think of the acronym "OJT," which stands for “on the job training,” but that captures the need to absorb dramatic twist and turns in the road as industry moves from a single, defined legacy service – whether comprised of narrowband voice centric networks, for example, or one-way multi-channel video service to consumers – to the three or four ring broadband circus of bundled services, applications and content that we have today, with two ground rules: 1) there’s never enough bandwidth; and 2) mobility counts.
So here are some interesting articles tangential to last week’s ruling; namely, that the cable operators are beating the telcos in signing up new customers, and that carriers in various sectors may contemplate alternate billing models to address disparities in bandwidth consumption by consumers. Said another way, the two ground rules above rely upon innovation and investment throughout the entire broadband ecosystem, where interdependence among the various species is key.
