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Technology Stocks : The *NEW* Frank Coluccio Technology Forum -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Frank A. Coluccio who wrote (14802)	4/27/2006 4:56:38 AM
From: axial	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 46821

Frank, Bob Frankston's piece elicited mixed feelings. I'd like to think his forecast is right, but I'm skeptical. At the extremes, change seems to fall into 2 categories - proactive (Korea, Japan, Sweden) and reactive, of which the US and Canada are two good examples. In the first category, some countries have been able to take impressive steps because the move to broadband was largely accomplished by governmental or governmental/industrial elite fiat. Not always, though: the impressive gains in Sweden and the Netherlands were more democratically enacted. For a mix of sociopolitical reasons, these countries moved quickly and cleanly to the new paradigm. They got "out of the box". It's not that they saw something we didn't - the vision of broadband isn't that elusive. And yet, it is. What we failed to see was the paralysis and inertia that would be imposed by legacy constraints of various kinds. In my opinion, the move to deregulation was done poorly: others did it better. They understood the difference between deregulation and abdication of responsibility. The expectation that legacy players would lead the charge to The Broadband Frontier was hopelessly naive. The difference between those who have made the most progress, and those who have fallen behind is that the leaders elevated telecommunications beyond the commercial domain. In some cases it was the national interest, in others the public interest, but in all cases, commercial interests were subordinated to a concept. Not disenfranchised - subordinated. They were still in the game, if they chose to be. That's what I call the "out of the box" solution. "In the box" is where we are in North America. Here, Frankston resonates: "What I don't plan to do is participate in discussions about which buggy whips are appropriate for controlling the flow of fuel through the carburetor according to the regulations that govern such things. OK, I'll probably do a little slumming but such discussions have about as much technical significance as the fine points of distinguishing between low-brow and high-brow diagnoses in phrenology. Alas, they still have political significance and better to cite them for foolishness than give them credibility." Exactly. What is the point of in-the-box discussions? We're smacking our lips over thin gruel. In the next room, they're carving the turkey and passing the potatoes. The drag imposed by various legacy and systemic constraints keeps sucking us back into the box, where legacy players stymie and stifle with regulation, lobbying, litigation, and a nauseating succession of "studies" that leave us further and further behind with every passing day. So we talk DSL and cable, when we should be talking FTTx. We may be "good enough" but others are "better". We talk. They DO. How do we get out of this morass? Only by getting out of the box. How do we do that? I don't know. I can't see us catching the broadband leaders in my lifetime. Not without moving the matter into the political domain. JMO, Jim