The IP Development Network Blog

Or is that a dunce's hat they are wearing?

Do Ofcom Have a Clue?
The most subjective point that I made in my recent iPlayer series, and in particular in my article on The Regsiter, was that Ofcom know what they are doing. I have had a fair amount of feedback along the lines of the following:

"Ofcom really don't have a clue about anything and just are pushed from pillar to post by the amount of lobbying going on. You are really naive if you think that someone in Ofcom is really the Wizard pulling all the levers in the background."

Is BT the Power Behind the Scenes?
This thesis holds that actually, it is BT that holds power. The theory goes that BT are able to make a weak minded Ofcom accede to their every wish through their use of Jedi mind tricks.

I agree that the Force is strong with BT. Their Regulatory department is staffed by the brightest people in Telecoms, whose role it is to confuse the heck out of the rest of us. Furthermore, there is evidence that BT seems able to pull victory from the jaws of defeat when it seems that they have been beaten into submission - but does this mean that we are under the spell of a great magician? Or is it just that (unlike everyone else), they just get on with it when decisions go against them?

In the late 1990s, it is certainly true that Oftel were pulled from pillar to post. They were naive and believed Mercury every time a grievance was raised. Similarly, they fell under the spell of MFS magicians who worked tirelessly for changes to the market that altered the telecoms landscape in the UK and throughout Europe.

Many of those same people who fought BT in the 90s have now found themselves at BT since the company's renaissance in the 00s. Another example of poacher turned gamekeeper in telecoms...

BT has Good Reason to Like the iPlayer
It is certainly true that BT wins from the iPlayer's launch. Their wholesale product still covers 34% of the market (excluding Retail) and the Capacity Based Charging scheme means that any extra iPlayer driven usage within this base just adds to BT's profits. The price of the BT Central product is worth noting - £155 per mbps per month.

In the long term, the iPlayer driven LLU may cost BT subscribers but certainly within the short term, the additional usage will drive wholesale revenues that more than fill any gap. Over the long term, the iPlayer is likely to drive backhaul circuit investments from LLU operators, which is revenue to BT too.

A Strategic Decision to Go Ahead
Of course the BBC Trust made the final decision to go ahead - but if Ofcom had turned to them and said, "look, there's an £831m bill, the ISPs don't have that kind of money", the Trust's hand would have been forced.

But Ofcom did not say that - the discussion probably went more along the lines of "look, there's a £831m bill, the ISPs will grumble but the investment is for their own good". In fact when the MIA was announced to the world, the press release made no note of the cost whatsoever and you have to work down to page 103 before you get to the detailed assessment! So did BT persuade Ofcom that the bill was an acceptable cost and not to make a fuss about it, or did Ofcom make its own mind up about that?

I see no evidence of BT being more prepared than the other players which is often a dead giveway that a decision has gone their way. In fact the initial suggestion that they too were fighting the launch, however off-the-record and however quickly retracted, suggests that there was no grand plan behind this. BT executive were clearly not all quite on-message.

My view is that Ofcom are now pulling the levers. More specifically, it seems that the levers are being jerked around violently as Ofcom battles to reign in the huge range of stakeholders over whom it has an influence. My conclusion is based on the fact that it seems that they can do no right by anyone which suggests to me that they are trying hard to balance opposing interests.

Equality of Hardship
Let's look at who Ofcom have upset recently... First came structural separation - it cannot be argued that this has helped BT because of the amount of work involved to demerge Openreach and create a set of systems and processes that could support the new design of wholesale market. It might be in the group's long term interests, but that is more due to the quid-pro-quo that saw the chains removed from BT Retail.

Then Ofcom upset the Broadband Stakeholder Group and a previous Ofcom boss, Kip Meek who feel that we are not doing enough to prevent Britain becoming a digital backwater. Next Ofcom upset customers and the market with their tacit acceptance of two tier pricing, before they upset the politicians who questioned whether the organisation was too big for its boots and was making political decisions.

Just when I was beginning to think that the interests of investors in LLU broadband were the only ones that had not been targeted, came the iPlayer. Having had a good run of it for a couple of years, the iPlayer brings down the hammer to signal the start of a new and much bigger wave of investment for those players.

Ofcom Understand the Dynamics
Ofcom clearly understand the market - assuming they they are unique in reading their entire Communications Market Report. Their 2007 version was published today and is a veritable goliath as research pieces go. I have printed it double sided on A4 paper and even without the Radio sections, the report sits over an inch high on my desk. I am sorry for the tree, but this is the only way to digest so much information. I am assuming that Ofcom have digested it...

So is it a wizard at Ofcom or a Jedi at BT? It may well be both - but it does not appear to me that BT is being favoured by the regime. Where BT wins is that it plays the regulatory game where ISPs do not.

The Regulatory Game
The game consists of huge volumes of data and documentation being passed backwards and forwards. What tends to happen is that the crucial part is in a footnote on page 142 where one sentence changes the market. BT will take time to read this and reply in kind, whereas the ISPs just don't put enough effort into unravelling the mysteries that BT and Ofcom conjure up until it is too late - and the iPlayer launches.

Is it Ofcom's fault that the game is played this way? Should they be made to stand in the corner and be subjected to ridicule for allowing BT to run rings around them? In my view, the answer is no - detail is a feature of regulatory policy making or there will be loopholes. Every player in the market knows this and has used it to their advantage in the past. If some players in the market believe that there are higher priorities at a given moment than responding to consultation, then that is their decision.

Trying to play the victim when the result doesn't go your way just strikes me as bad sportsmanship.

Labels: BT, catch-up TV, iPlayer, Ofcom, timeshift TV

# posted by Jeremy Penston @ 8/23/2007 03:32:00 PM

Thursday, 23 August 2007

Is there a Wizard at Ofcom?