Even before the first speaker takes the podium in the upcoming Broadband World Forum Americas, some of the best bun fights are already clear.
Who will own the infrastructure to carry high-speed services such as Internet-based video to homes and businesses? What kind of content do people want delivered on those big pipes, and how much will they pay for it? Will they receive it on fibreoptics, copper wire, wireless or some combination of the three?
One session at the forum, to be held Sept. 11-14 in Vancouver, sports the provocative title, "Wireline Telcos and the Internet: Friends or Foes?" It's a good question. Just a few years ago, incumbent telephone companies such as Telus (the conference's major sponsor) banked fat cheques every month from corporate and consumer voice customers. Now VoIP (voice over Internet protocol) has rocked their world in a way that's not very pleasant, and, as the conference organizers note, "threatens the very cash stream (voice revenue) that fuels the broadband expansions."
The panel's description goes on to explain how "wireline operators worldwide are responding to this threat by investing in further increases in access bandwidth to enable high bandwidth-managed services such as IPTV and video on demand."
The speakers for this panel come from fairly neutral ground, The Yankee Group and Accenture, but it's fair to predict that they'll tell the telco folks what they want to hear - in other words, if they spend enough on building and marketing broadband services, such as Internet-based TV, then "they will come."
Yet the idea of a managed, organized, telcom-run Internet TV service seems to fly in the face of what's really happening in the world. The free website www.youtube.com' target='_new'>www.youtube.com allows anybody to post a silly but entertaining video that just might outsmart and outdraw network TV shows.
Christopher Douglass, an IBM executive who will speak about "IT, Media and Telecom Convergence - The New Melting Pot," seems to have a good grasp on this new reality.
Even with everybody else trying to steal their turf, telcos retain a formidable hand of their own - millions of customers plus the core network, the strategy expert says.
To their credit, incumbent telco execs are not sitting around wringing their hands over the challenges and dilemmas they face. They're doing quite well in the cellphone arena. Telus Mobility, which was merged into the main Telus operation in November 2005, has been an industry bright spot.
Our telcom friends are even taking a pretty good swing at making their services attractive. Telus and its ad agencies have unleashed a menagerie of adorable creatures to push their products. Over at Bell, Frank and Gordon - those humorous if rather hapless beavers - keep showing up on TV. They can make pausing a video stream seem interesting and high tech, yet doable by a rodent.
No conference would be complete without somebody pushing a new mantra, and for this event the prize seems to go to Michael Anderson of New Jersey-based Telcordia Technologies. He's chairing a session that urges telecom providers to become "bundled, branded and best" by delivering services through a combination of retail outlets, web portals and user devices - "all at the most competitive price to the consumer.”
Now that cuts to the heart of the matter - turning all this technological wizardry into dollars. It's not as easy as it might look.
Sure, you can flog cellphones to teens and pre-teens. But once they get in front of a keyboard, a certain "I think I'll have this for free" mentality sets in. Consider the hype around the movie Snakes on a Plane. Pundits agree that the Internet was THE driving force in making this little epic more of a hit than perhaps it deserved. Bloggers fought to keep studio executives from changing the name to something dumb.
Video posting site www.youtube.com' target='_new'>www.youtube.com is bursting with "Snakes" tributes, parodies and knockoffs, and there's even a website where you can get a recorded Samuel L. Jackson voice to call a friend to pump the movie.
However, and it took a twenty-something to point this out to me, the very generation that is doing all this Internet tomfoolery around snakes is unlikely to shell out $14 to see it in a theatre. "We'll just download it from BitTorrent," my source said, "so they won't make any money from us."
Silly telcos, thinking they could replace grandma's reliable long-distance revenue with selling videos to young people.
The conference, which will be held at the Vancouver Convention and Exhibition Centre, also boasts a trade show with cool gizmos like "SIP over WiFi."
SIP (session initiation protocol) is what makes VoIP work, and WiFi is the thing that lets you roam around the house with your laptop. Put them together, as they have now, and you get a wireless phone that can call any other SIP phone, without incurring long distance or even local phone charges.
Organizing a conference is a business, and with registration fees ranging up to $2,995, probably a good one. But it's worth noting that the Chicago-based International Engineering Consortium (IEC), which is presenting the conference, has a policy of allowing professors and students to attend for free. A number of leading universities, including McGill and the U of Toronto, are formal IEC partners and, "based on knowledge gained at IEC forums, professors create and update university courses and improve laboratories."
That's got to be a good thing.
Hey, maybe while they have those college students around, they could ask them what, if anything, will pull them off BitTorrent and YouTube long enough to pay the telcos for something besides raw high-speed Internet access?
(Tom Keenan is a professor at the University of Calgary and an expert on technology and its social implications. He can be reached at keenan@businessedge.ca)
