PTC '08: 'Davos' on the Beach?
by: Steve McClelland, Principal & Consulting Editor (Telecommunications(R)), Personal Media Press
If there is one thing telecom needs, it's vision. Trouble is, it may not recognize needing a vision. Such myopia is down to a traditional industry culture and a dotcom bust retrenchment in the last few years. But the old ways of doing things are gone forever.
International voice traffic is less than 1% of overall international backbone bandwidth (a PTC '08 factoid), and the new players engineering applications at the edge of the network look more like being a determinant. Meanwhile, all over Asia, gigantic chunks of telecom infrastructure are being breathlessly slapped into place with goodness knows what consequences for global network strategy.
So PTC '08 defined in some positive sense a sense of dynamism for the industry and at least aired the questions that this dynamism poses. Amongst the top themes:
Is Asia-Pacific bandwidth supply and demand about to go exponential?
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Has the satellite industry rediscovered a sense of identity?
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Will new video applications and the YouTube generation power upstream growth?
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Is telecom indeed too important to be left to telecom people?
The last point comes from telecom guru Eli Noam at PTC '08 and reflects the increasing notion that not only are we entering a new era in capability, we are probably entering one in terms of government intervention and regulatory impact. The regulatory and societal story is yet to unfold, but PTC '08 was one of the first places it was identified. Welcome to Davos on the Beach.
[Editor's Note: Steve published 5 reports from PTC’08. The following are two featuring the discussion from the opening plenary and the plenary on the telecom wholesale business that he chaired:
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