After the pleasure of my trip to Hull today I thought it would be useful to get my thoughts down straight away.
Firstly a thank-you to Guy Jarvis and the Fibrestream team and to Lindsey Annison for pulling the day's events together and for getting us southern softies to venture above the Watford Gap!
The FTTH Colloquium was great - we had a huge diversity of people in the room from vendors to consumers to council members. In fact as was pointed out to me we had every single step of the fibre journey represented from the diamond saw to precision cut the roads through the physical ducts and fibre through the network equipment through the cloud-based services through the providers (both existing and new) through the backhaul to the consumer. Fantastic!
Unfortunately in such a short space of time and with such a wide audience we could only scratch the surface of the subject at hand but I felt, and all those I spoke to shared my opinion, that it was great to be able to speak with like minded people who share our common frustrations.
It was also suggested that I look to put together something to follow up on it in a more southerly location. I'd be more than willing to do that if there is the interest. Drop me a line and let me know. (BTW, it would not be London-based but probably Bucks or Berks somewhere and will almost certainly not happen until early 2010)
So to COTS... and let's be honest it was a downbeat meeting with little meaningful outcome for the majority of us there. My frank assertion is that for me, in my attempts to put together a community broadband network for my area, COTS holds no relevance. For two reasons: it assumes that I will want to interface to the major providers and leverage their services and it will (at least initially) not be enforced.
To the first point I am growing in the conviction that (for consumer services) there is no need to involve the existing communications providers (note I do not refer to them as service providers). Everything I want is online - whether it's gmail, iPlayer, iTunes, Twitter, Skype or just browsing I actually don't use my broadband line for anything else. So what I really want is a big fat pipe to the Internet. I'll pay for the content I want to the individual content providers.
This may change in the near future as premium content is delivered (for example HD TV) and the delivery mechanism may evolve in which case COTS will once again become relevant but here and now for us small community groups desperately trying not to get digitally excluded don't worry about it... JFDI!
Thursday 3 September 2009
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Agreed, the current ISP model reduces choice in some ways (ties customers into ISP specific email addresses for example) and it would be better to have end users picking services on the open market.
ReplyDeleteWe should also learn from the problems inherent in the multi-layer provision we have now, a single point of contact and accountability can only be simpler.
Agree with the original post, I was at the COTS and colloquium and echo the views of the author. By the time the COTS team have finished talking about it we could be well underway if we JFDI with the colloquium team. I agree we just need the pipe. Maybe JONs can deliver, or will they too be tied up into feasability studies and endless reports before they can act?
ReplyDeleteI also agree with PhilT, keep it simple. KISS.
chris