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Psst! You Can See the White of Their Eyes
by Gopal Miglani
President, BitRouter
www.bitrouter.com
July, 2003 Issue
I have read with interest the recent news that all the regional bell operating carriers (RBOCs) have agreed to cooperate and deploy fiber to the home (FTTH) networks. This will allow them to deliver very high speed of data and video content.
I have been involved with the telecommunications industry, both the telephone companies and the cable companies for a long time, since 1992, and have observed them and done business with both of them This most recent announcement gives me a sense of deja-vu.
Starting in 1992, Bell Atlantic was going to deploy a copper based network to deliver video to the home, based on the asymmetrical digital subscriber loop (ADSL) technology. This was subsumed by the TeleTV effort based in Virginia, where several phone companies, including Bell Atlantic and Nynex, were going to cooperate and deploy such a network. They put out a request for quotations and started negotiating and buying equipment and doing trials for a network and services that were not commercially viable and took the whole industry through a pied-piper scenario that eventually resulted in everybody getting drowned or at least taking a bath.
Simultaneously, the remaining phone companies started out the Americast initiative, where they were going to deploy video services over either Hybrid Fiber Coax (HFC) technology or over MMDS technology and they launched their consortium that included, Southwestern Bell, Ameritech, Bellsouth and others. They had their own request for quotations, negotiations and developments that resulted in nothing. While all this was going on, based on ADSL technology, US West laid its’ eyes on very high speed digital subscriber loop or (VDSL) technology and started massive trials. They also led several companies through various hoops. US West got acquired by Qwest and they negotiated and did some deployments, then cancelled everything because the telecom bubble had burst.
Now, when several of the previous tried technologies such as ADSL, ADSL+, HFC and VDSL are currently affordable and deployable on a commercial scale the phone industry has dropped them and wants to move onto fiber to the home. Do we see a pattern here? The pattern is this, the telephone industry, when it was a monopoly under AT&T, had a great asset in Bell Labs. Bell Labs would do all the futuristic development and AT&T would deploy the best available technology and reap its benefits.
The telephone industry is today run by those same people who either worked at Bell Labs or relied upon Bell Labs and we call them bell heads for that reason. Of course, the so called paradigm today has changed. There is no monopoly, there is at least a triopoly and there is competition to deliver a video service between telephone, cable and satellite companies.
It is no longer feasible to act as if you have a monopoly and try all the pie-in-the-sky technologies and spend inordinate amounts of money doing that and then perhaps deploy one or two of them. Today one has to look at what technology is available off the shelf, what will work today, can be deployed commercially and deploy it rapidly to stay ahead of the competition. The telephone companies are burdened with the millstone of Bell Labs thinking around their neck and fail to see this reality.
Like an unsupervised child in a candy store they pick up one candy bar, take a bite and before they can finish it, they see a bigger, better or brighter better packaged candy bar and run over to it, dropping the first one and take a bite out of that, not realizing that they have to pay for all the candies they have unwrapped and taken bites out of.
The cable and satellite industry on the other hand have never had this millstone around their neck. They have never had the luxury of having deep pockets and a research and development arm with unlimited budgets to try newer and newer technologies and sit on a monopolistic lead. They have to pick the best available off the shelf technology, weigh its return on investment carefully, take aim and fire. They realize that they do not have the luxury of a second chance. Each attempt to deploy one technology costs billions of dollars and one cannot afford a misfire.
The one person who realized this weakness of the telephone industry was the then chairman of TCI, John Malone. He was able to sell such a pie-in-the-sky to Michael Armstrong of AT&T and convince him that by spending a few dollars per home, AT&T could deploy digital cable to every home and once again become a national provider of local, long distance and high speed data and video services. Of course being bell heads, the AT&T folks bought into this and bought TCI for an inordinate amount of money and the results have been easy to see in hindsight.
What the telephone industry needs is a Donald Rumsfeld, who can cancel the futuristic weapon systems that are not needed for the realistic battle scenario of today or tomorrow and instead identify the current off-theshelf and in-the-pipeline technology that is commercially viable for the battle at hand. Sadly there has been no Donald Rumsfeld in the telephone industry for a long time.
The one sector of the telephone industry that has not had this problem is what is called the independent operating carriers or IOCs. These are old Mom and Pop telephone companies that have never had the pure research millstone around their neck and therefore have picked what will work and deployed it and are making money hand over fist. I am referring to IOC operators that are deploying very high speed DSL (VDSL) technology today and effectively competing with cable companies and making money for their shareholders.
I predict that this latest venture or rather misadventure initiated by the telephone companies, namely the negotiations, trials and potential deployment of fiber in the home technology will be a massive spectacular failure and though it may not be the last nail in their coffin, it certainly will be another nail in the coffin, which will lead to massive cash outlays that will be non-productive because their competition, the cable industry, is already deploying commercially viable telephone service technology based upon voice-over internet protocol (VOIP) technology, selling local and long distance phone service and taking business away from the phone companies.
My message to the telephone industry, “Come down from your ivory towers and see the battle field. You can already see the whites of their eyes. This is no time to tear down the old wooden stockade of copper in the ground and build a new stone fort of fiber to the home. This is the time to pick up the musket, load, take aim and fire.” Best of Luck.”
Copyright 2003 Viodi, LLC. All Rights Reserved
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