When you write to a word limit, as I did in my iPlayer Politics piece for The Register, there is often a fair amount that hits the cutting room floor. This article is going to pick up on a few of those themes and tries to answer an excellent question I received on the piece.
The Question
The question from Chris Fraser really gets to the heart of the debate from a user's perspective. An educated user, yes, but a user nonetheless.
"Why is it that once again we are being told by UK ISPs that our systems are not capable of delivering the type of service that has been available on the continent for some time? I am willing to believe that maybe the infrastructure is not up to the task. If that is the case why are they not willing to make the same investments as their European counterparts?
"Please can you give me a legitimate reason why Ofcom should not be forcing these ISPs to put their hands in their pocket and actually pay for a less out of date infrastructure when some of them are posting huge profits in their yearly financial accounts reports?"
History of UK Internet Access
The answer to this starts in the mid 1990s when internet access was via dial up and the vast majority of internet content was in English (US English to be precise). At that time, France, Italy and Spain in particular lagged behind in adoption rates because of the language barrier and so when DSL came along in the late 1990s, there was little to lose for the industry to make the step straight to DSL.
The other factor was the pricing schemes for dial up access. In the UK thanks to Freeserve, as elsewhere it became well established that dial up was via a local rate number. The difference was that local rate at peak times in the UK was close to 4p per minute. In France, Sweden and the Netherlands it was closer to 1p.
The UK's 0845 scheme was set up to provide artificially high (excess profits) to companies willing to invest in voice switches. This decision was made before dial up access was popular and was originally intended to spur competition in the voice market.
The result however was that dial up minutes swamped everything else and new entrant voice operators (OLOs) were guaranteed the lion's share (~70%) of the consumer price. A lot of this went in revenue share to ISPs, who had control over whose network their users 0845 minutes were carried by.
So with this nice gravy train benefiting OLOs and ISPs alike, no-one really wanted to do broadband. It took until 2003 for the latent demand to explode and DSL to really be taken seriously. This was fully 4 years behind France - a gap which we are probably still seeing today.
Other Factors
Population density is also a factor - Paris, Amsterdam and Stockholm is where the most notable OLO FTTH projects are now appearing in Europe. There you have a lot of multi-tenancy buildings which are much cheaper to connect than the individual dwellings we prefer here in the UK.
Laying fibre is not cheap, £600 per home in a city or thereabouts. If all you are doing is spending money to serve the same amount of revenue (prices do not go up when bandwidth increases) you get into the Broadband Incentive Problem. That's an article in itself but it is worth noting that BT may well soon start building fibre networks in new build estates - no copper, just fibre - where there is not the cannibalisation issue.
The Digital Divide and Natural Monopolies
The other issue that needs to be thought through is the whole Digital Divide problem. Is it right that ever faster broadband speeds are made available where it is economic and not where it is not? We have the luxury of being able to consider this still, because when you get to where France is now, you are on a one way street and may have to use significant state funds to address the problem. Do we as taxpayers want to do this in the UK?
The problem in my view is that telecoms infrastructure is a natural monopoly and competition is artificially imposed. The most efficient model is one network big enough to serve all and using cross subsidisation to level out inequalities in pricing and access speeds. Of course then the issue is not an economic one but a behavioural one.
Behaviour is less of a problem when you have multiple companies essentially reselling the monopoly asset at a regulated price, but then the problems are economic. All ISPs can do is stick a badge on the product and do some creative packaging. The value we as consumers see is not from the bits and bytes - they are a necessary evil - so we look for our broadband to be as cheap or as free as possible.
The LLU Factor Makes the Price War Worse
Some would argue that the last paragraph only describes the IPStream-based offers. LLU is different because the operators own the kit in the exchanges and control the circuits back to their core networks. LLU is cheaper than IPStream if you have more than around 300 connections off individual exchanges and its gets cheaper still the more users you have in that small geography.
There the ISP has an incentive to invest in LLU, but once you have made that incentive there is an incentive to play out a price war to grab market share. Consider the game theory behind the price war.
The reason ISPs lose their investment is because once you have made the investment, the next rational move is to reduce pricing in order to fill the network you just built because your incremental costs are extremely low. Obviously if everyone sees it this way (and they do) you end up with a continuation of the price war, only this time with a much lower floor.
This is not a unique problem for telecoms. Washing powder and countless other FMCGs have the same dynamic - for them investment in LLU is replaced by investment in production capacity. Once you have invested and find competitors have done the same, you might as well throw the original business plan away because the pricing power assumptions you might have made are just no longer there.
Recreating the Monopoly
The way out of this predicament is to rebuild your monopoly power through acquisitions, but when you do that you are again paying over the odds because the companies are valued by stock markets knowing the very weak position in which the buyer finds themselves. That's why so many companies that went on acquisition sprees find themselves in a bankruptcy position. The Goodwill you are buying is just not real because the product is such a commodity.
The final problem is that if you are really successful and get too big or rebuild the monopoly too far, you have the spectre of regulation and consumer group pressure as the US carriers are now finding since the re-creation of AT&T.
The Incumbents
The above is a very long winded answer to most of the question, but it still only deals with the position of a competitive carrier. The position of an incumbent is very different indeed.
There are really two incumbents in the UK - BT of course and Virgin Media will all the old cable franchise assets. I'll come back to BT in a minute because that is where the profits that Chris mentions in his question are being made.
Virgin has found itself in a strong market position - a superior service technically to BTs for the 47% on a cable run - but in a mess organisationally. Trust me, acquisition integration is nowhere near as easy as the CEOs will perhaps suggest in their briefings to investors. I liken it to spaghetti - a lot of customer service and network management systems that have been designed in isolation but have been brought together under one brand. I feel a huge amount of sympathy for support agents dealing with quad play customers because the information they have at their disposal is so poor!
BT is very different - they have a monopoly over the infrastructure serving the 53% and they face a very different problem. They make huge, humongous investments on a periodic basis like they are with 21CN which give them far more capacity than they need immediately on the routes they build. They are regulated to wholesale this product but they can't suddenly drop the prices to their new costbase because there is no immediate demand, so they have to leak it out gradually.
Nevertheless, both incumbents are in the same position: they have made investments and their shareholders want a return before the next wave of spending is released. Virgin in particular need to give back before they take more - which is why Private Equity has been circling the company. Both BT & Virgin have assets and market power and are in a position to make significant cash returns by slowing investment.
There is also the point worth considering that if BT moved too quickly fighting tooth and nail for the attractive markets, it could obliterate the competition that Ofcom has strived for twenty-something years to foster. Sure that would address the speed and capacity issue for some, but leave BT as a re-established monopoly responsible for a widening Digital Divide. Be careful what you wish for...
Ofcom's Attempt to Solve the Problem
So onto the final part of the question: what is wrong with Ofcom's gunboat diplomacy - get all these players, the OLO/ISPs, BT and Virgin to invest in a network for the 21st century and not just the 202nd decade?
Perhaps nothing, it was a similar strategy that led to the change in attitude by BT which got us to where we are now. Line everyone's business models against the wall at gunpoint, shine a light in their eyes and ask them some difficult questions.
Notice that I haven't mentioned the iPlayer at all in this analysis because the picture is much much bigger than the BBCs rather limited application. It could as much apply to YouTube, Joost or any other mass traffic source like Google or Yahoo!
The problem it seems to me is that it is very difficult to work efficiently at gunpoint. What is needed is for the ISPs and the content owners to stand down from the confrontation that has been bubbling up ever since AT&T vs Google in the network neutrality debates and work on a better way to make sure that the money flows down the value chain. It is absurd to expect a commercial entity to invest without the promise of stability and an ROI. ISPs today have neither.
Conclusion
The iPlayer's unique position as a free, advert-less, quasi-publicly funded product makes it an ideal political football. We are behind because of the unintended consequence of a regulatory decision in the 1980s to regulate NTS - long before most people had ever heard of the internet - and Ofcom is using the iPlayer as a battering ram to solve the unintended consequence of its actions years ago.
There is a very real danger that yet more aggressive action could have further unintended consequences. Ofcom may argue that actually it was the BBC Trust that had the final say on the iPlayer, but it would be naive to believe that this approval would have been given had Ofcom raised the ISPs concerns more strongly than they did in the MIA.
They may have plausible deniability but I think Ofcom knew exactly what they were doing and perhaps it will have the intended result - but it is a high risk strategy.
Labels: BT, digital divide, FTTH, iPlayer, ISP Products, next generation networks, Ofcom
# posted by Jeremy Penston @ 8/15/2007 11:26:00 AM
