What the market is going to get is probably going to be different to what people are expecting. Everyone is talking about superfast broadband, Ethernet in the first mile, fibre to the cabinet and fibre to the premises but the reality with the fibre based products is that this is still a long way off and they’re quite expensive. So for home office, small office, SME’s and even the residential market, superfast IP connectivity is still quite a long way off for delivering this to the actual premises.
A lot of Carriers and indeed O-bit can say they run their own high speed, multiple gigabyte IP networks in their core but the difficulty lies in getting that kind of infrastructure down to the customers to make use of the high speed IP networks. A lot of this is down to the access, the technology and mechanisms used to get from our P.O.P. down to customers which comes with quite a big price tag for the gigabyte connectivity needed to get to the customer premises.
What the customers are exactly going to get will ultimately come down to the amount they are able to spend and the business desire to have that kind of connectivity.
In terms of what O-bit could offer, it is down to what the customer wants whether it be one big IP pipe that’s agnostic of what you send over it. As long as it’s on IP it doesn’t matter what the app is. If it’s TV, voice, data base update, internet, email or other applications, it will be a pipe that traffic goes over on an IP based network.
Customers are getting these services now to a degree but the superfast service isn’t quite here certainly, however, feature rich applications and an agnostic network is here.
Suppliers are limited to the local loop to get information from the last exchange to the customer’s premises. There is a lot of progress being made for deploying 21st century networks using different technology in the local loops rather than depending on broadband, actually looking at Ethernet and fibre to deliver the superfast IP connections to customers.
There is quite a way to make this readily available and readily affordable and these are the two key points to concentrate on. There are pockets in the U.K. that have been targeted as places for roll out plans where they have fibre to the cabinet and fibre to the premises. A lot of these areas already have this capability but they happen to be fortunate geographically.
In terms of making this service available to the masses, and for the possibility of everybody benefiting from a superfast network end to end, this is still a mammoth task for every carrier in the UK. The market is probably looking at 8-12 months away from seeing a roll out taking an impact on the U.K’s ability to supply end to end services that are affordable.
The smaller carriers are somewhat dependant on the larger carriers upgrading, developing and rolling out the core big networks that these smaller carriers rely on to deliver their own services.
Including the resellers / partners / suppliers, not everybody can do everything. Carriers are good at carrying. Application providers such as Google or BBC are very good at supplying content and pushing that out on a network that is supplied by the carrier. Resellers can be included by selling different applications when partnered up with people who have got “sticky” applications and potentially get a share of revenue.
Why would the customer need high speed IP connectivity? If the reseller has that roadmap to go to the customer and say in 6months time there will be an explosion of cloud computing and everything will be done over the net which will reduce your cost. The customer will realize "I will need that connectivity".
In terms of IP services O-bit have a feature rich IP Telephony product in Purple Networx which has a number of features which give enhancements over the competition (Follow me services, recorded voice mail, remote back up, auto attendance). This is dependent on high-speed IP connectivity to the customer’s premises which for IP telephony is key. It’s about the quality of line and speed of the line which makes the end user experience what it needs to be.
In terms of other products O-bit offers, O-bit are just about to launch IPVPN services which is a private IP based network where customers can be reassured they are in a safe and secure environment to transfer their data around a nationwide network but also have some controls to break out to the internet from a central controlled point.
Comment from Paul Cloudsdale - Technical Director, O-bit Telecom
