Your naivete surprises me Gary -- and please don't take this personally -- I am not trying to get into a personal mudslinging contest.
Look, even Freeserve's business model is based on drawing internet access customers (i.e. getting their freebie customers to call into their ISP POP) which generates revenue from the local Carrier in UK. Basically every time a Freeserve customer makes a dial-up connection into Freeserve IP server, Freeserve gets a % cut of the local call revenue (which is metered in Europe - not flat like in North America). THIS IS HOW FREESERVE makes most of their revenue right now aside from advertising.
Now, let's see.........an ISP gives away their SERVICE (internet access) to make their revenue from telephony traffic to their server. Kind of a reverse business model from what you proposed will happen -- i.e. give away SERVICE to make money on BANDWIDTH!!!
Listen, data will grow - in fact it's growing astronomically right now. For me to sit here and deny that would make me an ingnoramus.
The point I am trying to make is that the current voice dominated PTT's and Carriers are also the DOMINANT carriers of data and they MUST get paid for routing and delivering data. They are NOT going to recoup their billions of dollars of capacity expansion (fibre optics, upgrades, local access DSL installations, etc.etc.) by running Freeserve or some psuedo Portal Monetization or E-commerce transaction procesing APPLICATION service business on the side.
Sure the PTT's will dabble in it and try this, try that -- (god knows they have done lot of stupid diversification like AT&T when they bought NCR and thought they will become a computer/data company)......and probably fail miserably at it. We all know (at least I know) that Carriers are traditionally terrible at marketing and customer service and eventually you will see the big PTT/Carriers (Global Crossing for example) specializing in doing what they do best -- BUILD AND MANAGE networks for millions of little & large ISP's, ASP's, Portals, Enterprise Intra/ExtraNets, and dare I say even managed VoIP apps who will PAY for bits to flow through Global Crossing's transatlantic, transpacific oceanic fibres.
NT's evolution is EXACTLY consistent with how the PTT's and Carriers are evolving. Their timing is not too late and not too early. If they are too late, Cisco's of this world might have had a chance. If they are too early, they would have invested in technology that would not have been purchased by the PTT's thereby hitting their bottom line heavily.
In other words, NT's transformation is consistent with the PTT's readiness to start serious upgrade of current circuit-switched network and CSCO will have a battle to dislodge NT, LU, ERICY, SIEMENS, NOKIA's of this world despite your simplification of how the world will all of a sudden be flooded with free bandwidth and all the PTT's will morph into some sort of Amazon.com service companies...........keep dreaming Gary but you will wake up one day when CSCO's P/E ratio comes down to earth when investors realize their humongous investment to attempt to crack the public network infrastructure market turns out to be far less successful than their forays into the Enterprise router market.
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