Ian Leader: Catching up after a long weekend in the wilderness, and the Telcos are bleating about all that terrible data they have to carry so that I can watch YouTube and friends.
In an article in the FT, the former state telcos in France, Spain and Germany are all making comments along the following lines: “Google should share some of its online advertising revenue with the telecoms groups, so as to compensate the network operators for carrying the technology company’s bandwidth-hungry content” (César Alierta, chairman of Telefónica).
Sorry, but I don’t buy it. I pay CableCom (Swiss cable company) the equivalent of about 90 USD / month for their fastest domestic broadband connection (25/2.5 MBit/s), and I pay SwissCom (former Swiss state telco) every month for a data allowance. If this isn’t enough to pay for the required infrastructure, then they should charge me more or provide less bandwidth for the same money. I can either pay up or switch to another provider.
And there’s the rub – the telcos might want to be more than “dumb pipes” but that’s essentially what they are, and it’s not in the interests of consumers for them to be more than that. If my web services are tied to my internet connection, then I can’t switch easily, nor can I choose to get my mobile and fixed line internet from different providers. Think about that .com email address you had when you first got on the internet. You give yourself far more flexibility if you go with Yahoo/Gmail/Hotmail etc.
So the telcos have become dumb pipes because that’s what a fairly efficient market supported by government regulation has delivered over the last ten years. And they take money from their consumers, so there’s no automatic moral case for them to take money from providers – nor do they have the leverage to force this to happen (unless they decide to act as a cartel!)
Good for you and me, and a shame they can’t move on from complaining about this and work on being the best plumbers they possible can be.
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