By and large they come up with sensible ideas about the future of telecommunications, though they take that difficult position of straddling the disruptive divide between the incumbent past and the faster moving future. The risk of having one foot in the grip of large, slow moving, comfortable monopoly incumbent from the past, and the other in the future agile novel disruptive world of diversity can easily be imagined.
But a recent post to their blog showed their savvy about the trend, and I was happily reading away, as one does when the content is agreeable, until I struck this line, and I acknowlege I may misunderstand and/or put too much weight on a single phrase, but:
The uncertainty of regulatory intervention ultimately works against the carriers, as it drives away risk capital.Doesn't "uncertainty" = "risk?" or is this some use of either term with which I was not previously familiar?
Isn't uncertainty precisely where risk capital is supposed to be invested?
This of course is one of the many hypocrisies of our brave infrastructure capitalists, risk rewards for gilt-edged security. Champagne on a beer budget.
They bloviate about the risk, while its arguable there is zero risk in frequencies, copper or fibre. They will all return, not at the monopoly rent level that may be their wish, but how much more sunk could a cost be than copper?
Yes, there have been losses on all those infrastructures, but I would argue it was because of over-enthusiatic investment based on monopoly rent returns on stove-piped services that didn't arrive.
Even fibre's cheap, if you're not a Telco ("How we paid the construction guys 18 pints of beer and they gave us a free metro fibre network in Palmy North")
Not sure of the situation in the UK, but our roads, sewers, water pipes, electricity lines, ie all transport infrastructures are funded by the commons, the services over them from a range of suppliers. Telecommunications at the fibre, frequency or copper, is no different.
You can debate the options, but its done when AT&T do it.
Having proprietary service/carriage integration in this day and age is like banks issuing their own currency.