Hi all,
OK, I admit it! I'm one of the 30-day freeloaders that you can expect to see a lot of in the next few days. As a peace offering I give you this interesting bit of text that I received in the mail a few days ago. Any of you that follow the MSPG discussion group on Yahoo know that MSPGs current reliance on POTS for Net access has been a lightning rod for criticism lately. I emailed MSPG IR (investor relations) to get the scoop on MSPG's high speed access strategy. I received the text below as a reply to my question. It is from a Charles Brewer speech, or more likely an amalgamation of several speeches. The IR rep I spoke to OKed it for public posting.
Enjoy,
Mr Bones
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>>MindSpring's Role in the Telecom Future
>>The Telecom World of the Future
Start with three things which I think are pretty clear:
1. We as a society, and certainly our government, are committed to having competitive telecom services to homes and small businesses.
2. It is increasingly clear that the primary telecom offering in the future will be a high speed, always on, packet switched connection.
3. It seems pretty clear that in the large majority of cases the primary high speed packet connection will be delivered to homes and small businesses through some sort of wired connection.
If all that is true, then we as a society face a choice. Either we rip up neighborhoods to install a new set of wires every time we want to add a new competitor to the market, or we find a way to effectively share the wires that are in place. That's not much of a choice. We absolutely will find a way to effectively share the wires that are in place.
Importance of service and support
In this telecom world of the future, the concept of paying by the call or paying by the hour will fade away. Bits are bits (though some may carry a higher priority), and the connection is always on. The business of carrying the bits will be one with commodity characteristics, and will carry margins that are appropriate to that.
Consider service and support, though. In this telecom world of the future there will be a whole variety of devices and applications sharing the packet connection in a home. This means a LAN in the home. It means there will be phone like devices hooked up to the LAN. Video devices. A variety of web browsing and email capable devices. And probably lots of devices we can't even imagine yet. This ain't gonna be easy! Already support is far more important in our ISP business than it has been in any telecom business in the past. It will become more difficult, and more important. In fact, I think support will increasingly become the biggest piece of economic value added in the telecom world at the residential and small business level. It will be the main thing that exists to get
paid for. Happily for MindSpring, we believe we are better at providing support to individual users on a packet switched network than any company in the world. Our quality is better, and we deliver it more economically. Wow! The key piece of the telecom future, and we do it better than anyone. Even better, the reason we are better is almost impossible to copy, since it is driven by the core values and culture of the company.
How to get our paws on the pipes
Because of our ability to economically please customers, we have the opportunity to be one of the major telecom companies of the future serving individual and small business customers. But to fulfill this role we must "get our paws on the pipes". That is, we must be able to get access to the physical network facilities that will let us deliver our services to our customers. There are three ways that we might be able to get our paws on the pipes.
1. We can look to form partnerships with companies that own the physical networks.
2. In selected areas we can build out our own physical networks.
3. We can purchase high speed transport from the companies that own the physical networks through normal commercial transactions.
I think by far the most promising way for us to get our paws on the pipes is Option Three - through normal commercial transactions. That is the way things are supposed to work now in the telco networks - though in practice that does not happen as readily as we would like. And if we are right about the conclusion we reached above that we will find a way to effectively share the pipes to deliver competitive telecom services to residential customers, this will happen in the cable TV company networks as well. |
