Predictions and Broadband

Are predictions in the IT sector ever worth it? I was at an event the other day where a number of predictions offered. A lot of research had gone in to these and they were all good, nothing extraordinary, nothing too far fetched. However, I was surprised by an omission that I believe is staring us in the face.

In essence, my prediction is that broadband must move to a utility model, customers paying for what they use, pence per Megabit. We pay for electricity, gas and the telephone in that manner, data has to be next, unlimited packages don't have a future. Customers want to download movies, tv, use iPlayer, watch YouTube, listen to internet radio, share pictures, play multiplayer games - it's all taking more and more bandwidth and let's face it the media companies serving up all this fare are highly unlikely to pay for what their customers download or stream. ISPs usually run at 96% to 98% utilisation, why wouldn't they, but now with ever increasing bandwidth requirements, they need to invest in their back-haul and that's very, very expensive. Then there's fibre - more kit, more expense. Someone has to pay and if the companies peddling the content won't pay then the customer has to pay.

ISPs should be making plans to move to a utility based model as soon as possible otherwise we're going to see under investment in the network, mass customer dissastisfaction and a government forever wailing about lack of internet access for all.

I don't understand why people think that delivery of the internet is easy or cheap. It's not, it's massively complex and massively expensive. Just to stand still, continuous investment of many millions of pounds has to be made and ISPs just cannot afford to make the step-change that's needed to deliver the bandwidth that people are buying through all you can eat packages.

Again, all this tells me that ISPs must move to a utility model. At the moment though they're all waiting to see who blinks first because their shareholders and analysts judge them on customer volumes and churn rather than data shifted. Who's going to be the brave one first? Come on, someone.... Please?