Re: Infrastructure Spending Projections / Last Mile Bottlenecks / Europe
Thread- Just got back from a trip to France and this little article I just found is timely. I don't know how much news out of Davos, site of the World Economic Forum, made it to the mainstream US press. But in Europe, it was quite a big deal.
This year, IMHO, was a watershed year for the Internet. It might as well have been titled, World Internet Forum. That is how much emphasis was placed on the importance of getting wired. Both Bill Gates and Steve Case warned Europe to get on the bandwidth wagon and do away with the telecom monopolies that is making Europe slow to react to the Internet phenomenon.
Comments by Esther Dyson were most accurate. She stated that most of Europe still doesn't get it. Europe still thinks of the Internet as being a US phenomenon. I found this to be quite accurate considering in Paris there is only one Internet cafe! Contrast this to a recent trip I made to Bangkok, where there was an Internet cafe on every block. Asia clearly gets the message. Europe is way behind.
There are exceptions to this of course(Sweden being one), but generally speaking, it's do or die time for Europe to get connected. I think with this years gathering of World political and economic leaders, it was clearly pounded in to them to go home and put things in order. Either get connected or else face the consequences of being left behind in the new World economy. A message of great significance to last mile investors. --MikeM(From Florida)
PS I linked this to another post I did about trillion dollar infrastructure spending and last mile bottlenecks. It's interesting to compare the two articles. One is out of AFCI, the other NT. And they do somewhat correlate.
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Net Infrastructure Spending To Hit $1.5 Trillion In 2003
DAVOS, SWITZERLAND, 2000 JAN 31 (Newsbytes) -- By Adam Creed
Spending on Internet infrastructure, including purchases to increase bandwidth and the building of high speed fiber optic networks, will reach $1.5 trillion in 2003, according to Nortel Networks.
Nortel's research, produced with market research firm IDC and released at the annual meeting of the World Economic Forum today, predicts that the Internet infrastructure segment of the Internet economy will more than quadruple to reach $1.5 trillion by 2003.
According to Nortel and IDC, spending on high-performance infrastructure will be greater than spending on e-business in 2003, which itself will grow by 86 percent annually to reach $1.3 trillion.
"The explosion in demand for bandwidth and the growing reliance of business and industry on the Web requires building a new, high-performance Internet as a matter of urgency," said Ian Craig, executive vice-president and chief marketing officer at Nortel Networks.
The total Internet economy is expected to generate spending of as much as $2.8 trillion in 2003, more than the gross domestic product of most national economies.
Europe is predicted to be the fastest-growing region for e-business over the period leading up to 2003, with annual growth of 118 percent.
The companies also forecast "bottlenecks in the first mile," [same as, "last"] with 87 percent of homes still relying on narrowband connections to the Web. Cable modem and DSL (digital subscriber line) connections are only expected to reach 7.7 percent and 4.4 percent of homes worldwide by 2003.
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