Richard Stastny has some interesting observations and comments on Voice over IP and its transformational impact on the telecommunications universe posted on his blog These are Richard’s take-aways from the recent VON conference.
While I agreed with most of what Richard had to say, I didn’t necessarily follow or agree with this one comment:
There was only one displeasing issue pointed out for me by Brough Turner in his presentation: the telcos are squeezed also from the lower layer (layer 0 is he named it). The access is also not a safe heaven in future, because there is (will be) competition here too by independent FTTH providers. They will lease, rent or sell the fiber to the customer. And if the customer has finally a fiber to the home, he is set. The currently existing bandwidth gap is solved. And the customer now may choose his ISP at the co-location room.
I would really like to believe this is the model that will prevail. I still have significant concern, however, of the difficulty of a market for true facility-based competition for last mile services. This is not that I think the market cannot be there. Quite the opposite. My supposition is still that local authorities are going to be reluctant to offer up rights of way to competitive providers who are not incumbent telcos, cable companies or maybe (if they’re generous) utility companies. My read of the new telecom bill reflects this worry.
