Small, Simple, Cheap, and Fast - OHMMMMMMMM

A fact not often considered is that most residential consumers are paying around $1500/year combined to get broadband, TV content, and voice telephony to their homes. Add in mobile voice telephony, and that number goes up to maybe $2500-3000/year, at least. Wow! That's a lot of money and a big chunk of many household budgets, in after-tax dollars! How did it grow so much, when we used to get radio and TV "free" over the airwaves, and paid about $20/month for telephone service? Sure, we paid a lot more for long distance back then, but we were jealous of our minutes and didn't spend a lot of time on useless gabbing - its now a sign of age to recall your mother shouting to your father "Hurry up, it's LONG DISTANCE!"

But every time I turn on my digital cable TV, I see an ad about bundled voice, and indeed, you'll see innumerable TV ads on just about any channel talking about the value of digital telephone service "as low as $29.95/month." How did telephone service get to be a "bargain" at such rates? Here's a sample bill (not scientifically accurate, but I believe close to reality).

Digital Voice - $29.95
Video Service (cable or satellite) - $45.95
Broadband Service - $42.95
Total Triple Play "Value" - $118.85
Multiply times 12, you get $1,426.20

We've become so used to paying these fees, we rarely stop to wonder about an alternative vision, or if we are getting all that we could be getting. But the future version of these services are out there, in the form of newer technologies.

In contrast to this status quo, imagine a solution that is Small, Simple, Cheap, and Fast. (and keep repeating that mantra). Small, because that keeps costs low and provides lots of choices, allows more focus on niche solutions, and lowers barriers to entry. Simple, because there are fewer moving parts (see above) and that means the solution is more likely to work/less likely to fail. Cheap, because the costs of these new solutions are quite a bit cheaper - going over the air without paying for spectrum rights avoids such massive capital expenditures as trenching and spectrum rights acquisition through auctions. Fast, because its fairly simple to hang up these nodes on light poles or mount them on rooftops.

We're now living in a world that is undergoing near constant change, on a rapid basis. When you have such dramatic change so consistently, doesn't it make sense to approach things differently than you have in the past? Doesn't it make sense to experiment with new models and try on new ways of doing things? Doesn't it make sense to take some risks? That's yet one more benefit of using new business models enabled by these new technologies - they allow rapid feedback cycles, which enable rapid improvement cycles. It's just like Open Source Software. Lots of experiments, lots of innovation, lots of improvements.

That is what I believe is the bottom line on the need for different approaches to broadband provisioning:

A divergence from the status quo is called for, and an opportunity presents itself to model the success of Open Source software development. This is what we will see more and more of in the coming year - more experimentation, more innovation, more change. As consumers, we should open ourselves up to new ways of doing things, exploring what we value and what we can do without. There are multiple lessons to be learned if we will set off on this path.