Broadband pricing and useage caps

Susan Crawford’s posting on ‘Bit caps, consolidation, and Clearwire’ makes some interesting observations:

• Koreans rate their (nearly 100 Mbps) broadband connections as being ‘ordinary’
• Australians say having fixed caps and overage charges is misery
• The Japanese have discarded metered access in their post unbundled/separated regime
• In the US, carriers are looking at moving away from ‘all you can eat’ access pricing to metered access; but the Sprint/Clearwire natioanl wireless network proposal may provide an alternative

So there are quite distinct broadband pricing strategies and market structures in the above – some shaped by regulation and others not.

Meanwhile, the world watches US wireless policy closely (including operationalising the ‘open access’ specs for ‘C’ band spectrum).

10 Things You Need to Know About the Future of Broadband – GigaOM

10 Things You Need to Know About the Future of Broadband – GigaOM

This article was written by Martin Geddes, chief analyst at STL Partners, drawing on the views of over 800 ‘industry insiders”.  There are some very interesting observations. A big concern expressed by some about the future of the telecommunications networks is in becoming “dumb pipes”. There is a more positive view expressed here, but not the usual one (ie. that telco’s can transition to be fully integrated, convergent ICT and media service companies delivery applications and content as well as communications services).

According to Geddes, telecommunications providers future lies in being specialist logistics providers for valuable data – including network provisioning (including traffic shaping) and authentication utilising multiple delivery systems.  The providers of applications and content will be willing to pay the telcos to handle the network logistics problem for them.

Voice is described as the catalyst through the anticipated rapid deployment and use of embedded voice applications as part of the everyday online experience.

Seems worthy of deeper consideration to me. If the views expressed are right, the consequences may be resolution of network incentive problems to provide higher bandwidth, as well as easing some ICT sector concerns about network neutrality.