The best of broadband: mobile internet, iPlayer, fast speeds and future convergence
Wednesday 23 December 2009 Comment |
Below you will find the thoughts of an elite group of broadband experts as they look back over broadband in the noughties, before looking into their crystal balls and predicting what is in the future for the internet. Thank you to the following for participating in Broadband Genie's end of decade round-up:
Jon James, broadband director, Virgin Media
Sylvain Thevenot, senior director of products and strategy, TalkTalk
Tom Williams, head of operations, BE Broadband
Clodagh Murphy, director, Eclipse
Richard Griffiths, head of marketing, Kingston Communications (Karoo)
Howard Wilcox, senior analyst, Juniper Research;
Matt Hatton, research director, Analysys Mason ; John Strand, CEO, Strand Consult
Jon James, broadband director, Virgin Media
The noughties
It's almost 10 years since broadband was first launched in the UK by Virgin Media (then Telewest) in March 2000. Less than a decade later, Virgin Media changed the landscape once again when it launched 50Mb, the UK's fastest broadband, on its ground-breaking next generation network.
Faster broadband speeds give consumers new and transformational ways to interact and entertain themselves using a range of applications – from downloading film and music from iTunes, uploading photos to sharing sites like Flickr, streaming of content on YouTube and Spotify to social networking, microblogging and online gaming. With our superior fibre optic cable network, we are uniquely positioned to deliver this.
The future
As we said at the launch, 50Mb is just the tip of the iceberg for us. We've already started testing 200Mb, and are trialing a range of upload speeds of up to 10Mb. The time and money invested in our network means we are able to stay ahead of the burgeoning demand for a richer media experience.
50Mb is the first of a series of high-specification, super-fast products that will support successive generations of applications combining content with the functionality required to get the best out of them. In the future, we will be delivering ultimate convergence – not of multiple product offerings, but of the applications themselves, each interacting to provide a seamless entertainment experience.
Sylvain Thevenot, senior director of products and strategy, TalkTalk
The noughties
My main thing for the noughties would be the mobile internet and how the 3G network, and before it GPRS, has allowed people to stay in touch with the rest of the world via the internet: mobile email and social networking have been phenomenal. You can be on the move and still be on the internet, it has been incredible. And now devices such as the iPhone are transforming the industry.
The future
This year I'm hoping to see a lot of clever things coming from TalkTalk – if not, I wouldn't be working here! The foundations of our network are in place, so it's now about products. I think peoples' communication needs are going to be serviced differently. Whether it's a clever integration of social networks to allow the triggering of a voice call, or a truly enabled mass market video service, or a fourth screen, with people finally engaging in video calling, for example, I don't know. But whatever it is, it will be in communication.
Time spent communicating has not gone down; if anything it has increased, we just use different methods. But each generation uses different means – we need some kind of unification. Even late entrants are perceiving communications in different ways: my own mother in law was very late to the internet, but now she uses it primarily for communication – she sees her grandchildren thanks to video conferencing and emailed images. It is now important for her and I find this staggering – it has evolved people's perceptions, even the older generations.
Tom Williams, head of operations, BE Broadband
The noughties
The launch of BE Broadband in 2005 of course! We were the first premium ISP in the country to provide ADSL2+, offering the fastest speeds around at the time. The product was, and still is, one of the best in the business, constantly winning awards and pushing ADSL2+ technology to its limits.
The future
Fiber-to-the-cabinet (FTTC) is a technology that we're looking closely at. Basically FTTC means that fiber, the means of carrying broadband, will be typically closer than 300m to member’s premises, with the final connection being copper. While the actual speed depends on a number of factors, it could be 50 Mbps, 100 Mbps or even 1 Gbit/s using currently available technologies. Beyond that is fiber-to-the-home (FTTH), where fiber reaches a member’s premises, such as a box on the outside wall of a home. That will mean even faster speeds and change the way we interact with the web as we know it.
People will begin to see the value of a premium broadband provider, such as BE. The way we live our lives online requires us to have the fastest and most reliable broadband available, which means that more people will be turning to BE for their broadband. We’ve got some plans up our sleeve that will cement our position as one of the leading ISPs in the UK today and look forward to welcoming more new members into the BE community.
Clodagh Murphy, director of Eclipse Internet
The noughties
In the consumer arena it was the iPlayer technology, where broadband became a broadcast medium. In business it was greater productivity through low cost, highly reliable broadband.
The future
For consumers, we will see broadband become the heart of home entertainment in every living room in the UK. For small businesses it will be the growth of higher bandwidth broadband including bonded DSL
Richard Griffiths, head of marketing at Kingston Communications (Karoo)
The noughties
The noughties has been the broadband decade with adoption going mainstream, driven by innovation in both technology and the applications it enables to be delivered to users. One of the most exciting trends has been the widespread adoption of Wi-Fi and wireless networks. Wi-Fi has fundamentally transformed the way people and businesses use the internet and liberated us all from being bound to our desks. It has made it possible for people to remain connected and online almost where ever they are, whether it’s on the train, in a coffee shop or even down the pub.
But if I had to identify the most significant moment over the last decade, it would not be the launch of Facebook or iTunes, but Christmas Day 2007 – the day BBC iPlayer was officially launched and changed Internet use forever. Online video has come a long way since Kingston Communication’s pioneering Kingston Interactive TV (KIT) service and looks set to grow exponentially. It has been building momentum for some time with the massive success of YouTube, but it has only been in recent years that people have begun changing their viewing habits to watch full length programmes online. Sky Plus paved the way for non-linear programme viewing, but it was iPlayer that brought mainstream TV programmes to the mass market as ‘catch-up’ TV online.
The future
Remember when the DotCom bubble burst because the markets lost faith in the Internet as a serious, profitable medium? Now people can’t live without it and it is an intrinsic part of their lives. Services such as iPlayer and Spotify may well have revolutionised entertainment, but the really exciting thing is that there is still so much potential in broadband-based technologies for people to tap into.
Tele-medicine is just one example – imagine being able to see your doctor via video conference rather than having to travel to the surgery if you are feeling unwell or risking diagnosis via the phone. Public services could be totally transformed if the technology is applied in the right way and this would provide a key driver for bridging the so called ‘digital divide’.
The technology underpinning this next revolutionary wave will undoubtedly be fibre broadband. This would make it possible for everyone in a household to watch quality HD online content when they want, all at the same time, and enable the increased delivery of community, government and health services online direct to people in their homes. In the short-term we expect to see bandwidth usage continue to grow massively, particularly as HD services continue to be launched and made available online.
Bill Gates never actually said 640K should be enough for anyone, which is just as well as he’d look pretty daft now. However, the Government set an equally low aspiration when The Digital Britain report said the goal for universal access is 2Mb by 2012. If online usage continues as it is, we’re going to need a whole lot more than 2Mb by then. Even in financially-straitened times, it’s been proven broadband is a must-have, on a par with other utilities. Broadband is fast evolving from an information-enabler to a home entertainment-enabler, opening up on-demand TV and radio, group communications and collaboration possibilities we could only dream about in the early noughties!
The future
The advent of LTE with faster mobile broadband than fixed – is this the dawning of the age of fixed and mobile convergence?!
Matt Hatton, research director, Analysys Mason
The noughties
The most exciting event of the noughties was when broadband finally went mobile in october 2007, courtesy of cheap consumer offers, user-friendly plug-and-play dongles and truly broadband HSDPA networks. Only in 2007 was the promise of 3G finally realised, with all the opportunity and risk that it brings for operators.
The future
The biggest challenge for the next few years is how operators deal with the growing demand for wireless data. To do it they'll need a combination of new technology, improved integration of fixed and mobile networks and clever subscriber traffic management.
John Strand, CEO, Strand Consult
The future
If we look at the market for broadband in Europe, we will experience increasing competition, the sales of mobile broadband continue to explode and an increasing number of customers drop their DSL connections for a mobile broadband connection.
What is driving this market is falling prices, and an increasing number of laptops with embedded 3G, and the fact that more and more operators are aggressively targeting prepaid broadband. Simply put the development from mobile telephony is repeating itself with mobile broadband.
In the UK you will see an increasing number of MVNOs launching prepaid mobile broadband and products which are hybrids between prepaid and postpaid will be sold online, much the same way as 3 is doing in Denmark via their low cost brand Oister.
The English market varies from a number of others. This is not because the English do not want the same things, but because in the UK there is a difference in the product the operators market and sell and what the customers get. The UK operators have under invested in their 3G networks, which means the customer experience is not the best and customers don’t get the product they are paying for.
With the merger of Orange Mobile Broadband and T-Mobile you will see the new player having a joined network which can handle the customer’s needs, at the earliest, in one or two years. The organisation is in place, and they have created the network which is the primary target of the merger, but they will limit investments. The result will probably be a new network, which will start in the end of 2010.
It will be exciting to see if Vodafone and O2 choose the model known from Sweden, where Telenor and Tele2 have decided to build a joined network. On the other hand, this will take time to get an agreement in place, so more time before customers experience the benefits from these joined networks. However, these new networks will be the foundation for operators producing cost-effective mobile broadband in the future.
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