At this point the slow death of the traditional Canadian ILEC’s has already begun.

T.

I was puzzled by your commentary. I can only assume you weren’t at VON to hear my presentation first hand. In my speech at VON, it was clear that I did not offer a suggestion as to who was going to drive Internet II. I believe that the powerful ecosystem which I call the Hypernet (you call it Internet II) will expand and grow in unpredicatable ways along a variety of vectors. Yahoo, EBay, Google arrived unpredictably and disruptively. DSL has been deployed disruptively in some countries (Japan, Korea) and is taking off in the US after a slow start.

Carriers (a broad definition) that “get it” (some will, some will not) will have to focus not only on building the ecosystem but also providing useful “digital services” in order to monetize the investments needed to support this high performance digitial ecosystem. Over the top (OTT) providers of digital services will focus on specific vectors which create useful value chains. Some will innovate and grow, others (remember the dot com bomb) will not.

Lots to discover, even more hard work ahead of all of us - the workers of the emerging “on demand digital era”….

P.S. Don’t assume that folks who work for a carrier are “bell-heads”. You might be surprised at the creative talent to be found in the carrier co’s….yes even in the good old USA….. We might consider calling them…”bell aheads”….

E

Naturally, he has to say that in order to be seen as relevant. But, of the Bells, BCE is one of the best. Dig through their annual reports. You’ll see they’ve been a quad play player since the late 90’s. Unlike the situation in the US, there was no breakup in Canada. Eugene truly does have a rich and diversified set of communications assets. The challenge for him, now, is to make those assets work for Bell in the face of competition from cable, and IP insurgents.

A

It’s funny to hear a bell-head opine on the next generation Internet. Lessee, we break-up AT&T, competition ensues in the WAN, the disparate RBOCs resort to flat rate local pricing to preserve their Class5 monopoly, and datawonks (the ones who like distributed anarchy and promote SPAM) see an opening to the access barriers through distributed local data access (Steve Case, et al). That’s the foundation for the first internet. On top of that was piled IP/arpanet, www, html, browsers, email, search, commerce, porn. That’s Internet 1.

So how does Eugene come off saying that the bells will be able to drive Internet II? As best I can tell it will once again be through unintended consequences from actions taken to preserve their access monopolies! At the same time, legacy service providers and vendors face the widest pricing and application chasm (of Mt Everest to a mole hill proportion compared to 1988) that they’ve faced in 20 years. So no room, this time around, for mistakes and unintended consequences.

Michael Elling
Information Velocity Partners, LLC