Digital Cities: Service Provider Perspective

First and foremost, I'd define the Service Provider Dilemma as follows: the industry, for all of its progress, is still in its infancy and to many observers, from large incumbents to enterprise service providers to city government officials, still in a Proof of Concept stage. No clear business models are yet proven out with quantifiable case studies. We're starting to see that, but frankly, until we start analysing some of the largest deployments, we won't have the hard data to communicate with skeptics.

Who's going to do the proving? That's the service provider dilemma - to build these networks in a speculative fashion is a risk that not many are not yet prepared to make. So, despite the incredible value that these new technologies provide, we have a plethora of small scale deployments - we're just starting to see large deployments mature, such as Corpus Christi and Tempe.

We're still in the experimentation stage, and that's frustrating for big service providers, who need to see a clear road to the ROI before their executives will commit resources to this space. Smaller innovators can take more risks, but they lack the deep resources of the big guys.

I believe that that puts a premium on all of us to help each other where we can. Can we focus on 1) learning and education; 2) on experimentation, trials and proofs of concept and pilots, and 3) collaboration, both Private/Private, Public/Private and geographic among regions? We'll see. If and its a big if because many are not ready to go there, but if we're able to work together in some coordinated fashion, we can get to our mutual goals sooner.

So my dream is that we see ourselves reaching our goals sooner than we thought because we find safe ways to work together and collaborate to collapse cycle times and learn more efficiently. I saw yesterday that there is significant interest to focus on common areas, such as customer service,, that we all can agree on and go from there. I'd urge you public sector guys to challenge yourselves in similar fashion, to identify what you can do to help each other.