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Viodi View Newsletter – May 25th, 2005
Kink-Free Telecom – Live and In-Person
By Ken Pyle, Viodi, LLC
The Telecommunications Association of Michigan’s Annual Meeting was both a good time and informative. With his quick-wit and easy-going style, Scott Stevenson, President of TAM, definitely sets the tone for this innovative state trade association. I recorded the conference and we are still determining the best way to proceed with the recordings. The following is a brief glimpse of my approximate 23 pages of notes from this two day conference.
“It’s a different world”, said Mike Osborn, General Manager of Allendale Communications, a smallish independent telco located in Allendale, Michigan. Osborn was referring to the idea that the provision of video services is not the same as what is required for providing telephony services. I had the pleasure of moderating a panel with Osborn and Tung Dang of Occam Networks. Unfortunately, Howard Shaprio had airport issues and could participate in this panel. Each of the speakers focused on three challenges that telcos face when rolling out video services.
Allendale’s approach to offering video service has been somewhat unique as they started with a focused effort towards off-campus college housing. In one case, they secured and installed 300 apartments in one week. Their next target was the extension of bundled services to residential customers. Osborn said internal education was part of their recipe for success. This meant educating the staff to let them know how critical new revenue is for long-term survivability. Much of the learning was on the job, but he stressed the importance of keeping the I.T. group in the loop and training front office personnel, so, in turn, they could educate their customers.
One of the other challenges he mentioned was in-home and in-apartment wiring. He expressed his appreciation for his plant manager who took responsibility for solving these and other technology-related challenges. The business issues associated with obtaining franchises and acquiring content were cited by Osborne as the third challenge. He suggested that a time and money need to be allocated for these endeavors.
An interesting observation made by both Osborn and Tung Dang is that consumers demand higher reliability from their video service than they do with telephone. It will be interesting to see how this changes, as television consumption moves away from an “appointment” model to one of network and PVR on-demand. Regarding behavioral changes, Dang suggested that consumers communications patterns are becoming more symmetric as they become both producers and consumers of content. He used this as an argument to support an active, fiber architecture for fiber to the home deployments, since it allows for symmetric transmission up to one gigabit per second.
My comments focused on the importance of the product management and marketing to a telcos’ success in adding new services. The challenges for an independent telco include keeping up with the rapid pace of change, differentiation of its service and promoting its service in such as media-cluttered world. I suggested that concentrating on the strengths of its local presence is the key to addressing these challenges.
SBC’s Booth at TAM’s Annual Meeting
SBC demonstrated their U-Verse product at the TAM Annual Meeting. U-Verse is the name for the bundled services that have been associated with their rollout of IPTV. What is not so widely reported is that this banner will be used to describe the offering supported by the 2Wire combination Satellite Receiver/Digital Video Recorder/Internet appliance/Personal Multimedia Server.
SBC showed examples of the services and features that are part of their U-Verse vision. For instance, they suggested that one will be able to use their Yahoo! web account to set his television viewing preferences (e.g., allow personal photos to appear on televison, program DVR, etc.). They showed a wide variety of consumer devices that will be able to interact with their service. This exhibition was clearly a good opportunity for SBC to impress upon Michigan legislators of their commitment to bring better service to SBC’s customers.
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Peter Lowten and I had a chance to sit down with Ervin Lebinovici at the IPTV 2005 conference to discuss why the FastWeb deployment has been successful. With over 200,000 IPTV subscribers spending over $100 per month, FastWeb has been held up as an example of how to implement IPTV. FastWeb has also been a key customer of Bitband, representing 40% of the 500,000 streams Bitband has deployed.
He suggested that operators must target the service, not the technology. FastWeb has put together a bundle that is attractive and is not available from the competition. To get ahead of the competition, an operator must, “get going”. Standards are great, but in today’s environment, operators do not have the luxury of waiting for perfection. In this go-go environment, system integration and scalability become critical to long-term success.
FastWeb’s success has translated into Bitband’s success, as Bitband’s sales for the first quarter of 2005 were greater than the entire fiscal year 2004. With ten deployments in Europe, Bitband has set its sights on the United States. The opening of their new Silicon Valley office is evidence of that U.S. focus.
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