With a new child at home I've been limiting travel, well trying to, so this year only the two most important conferences in my calendar are attended: Mobile World Congress (MWC) in Feb and Broadband World Forum (BBWF) in October.  Informa have taken over BBWF so their massive conference machine, and in particular Gavin Whitechurch, have put together a great event.  I consider BBWF to be the key event in the broadband calendar, and though not yet the scale of MWC in the mobile world, its well on its way.

The conference brochure is now available for download here.  By the numbers there will be 6000+ attendees, 280+ exhibitors, 200+ speakers, 125+ global carrier case studies & presentations.  The latter number is key, like MWC this is one of the few events operators attend.  In particular, there will be the leadership figures of:

• DooWhan Choi, President Corporate Technology Group, Korea Telecom;
• Mike Quigley, CEO National Broadband Network, Australia;
• Hugh Bradlow, CTO Telstra, Australia;
• Olivier Baujard, Chief Technology Officer, Deutsche Telekom; and
• Dr Shyue-Ching Lu, Chairman & CEO Chunghwa Telecom.

Then more importantly from my perspective the people that make the decisions at the coal-face (in particular from my sessions):

• Mark Hahn, Systems Architect, Verizon;
• Christophe François, Vice President, Mobile Multimedia Products & Services, Orange; and
• Colin Pons, Senior  Strategy & Business Analyst, KPN Telecom.

I show below the two sessions I'll be chairing at the event.  The SDP session will have Mark from Verizon and Colin from KPN presenting their experiences.  On the panel session will be the presenters and Ty from Oracle and Lucia from Huawei.  I've known all for most of this decade, they are the leading implementers and thinker in this space, so we're going to have a stimulating discussion to say the least on the first day.

On the last day of the conference is a session I think will be great fun: Developer Communities and Service Innovation.  Mark, Colin and Christophe from Orange will be giving rapid fire 'elevator pitches' on what they're doing, then with Varun Arora (CEO HomeCamera, winner of last year's InfoVision Award) and Sean O'Sullivan (CTO Dial2do) we'll have a frank and open discussion between operators and developers.
 

Tuesday 26th Oct 1430-1545: Service Delivery Platform Evolution Revolution, Convolution, Amalgamation, Elimination or Virtualization?
Examining the impact the confluence of several critical technologies / developments have on the SDP such as: cloud computing / managed services; and open initiatives such as Joint Innovation Labs, GSMA's OneAPI, OMTP's BONDI, Open IPTV Forum, and OSGi (Open Services Gateway initiative).  Reviewing key trends in operators' requirements and their competitive environment as web and telco converge. Present a view on the current and likely future evolution of the SDP: will it change, get more complex, will silos finally consolidate, or will it simply go away?

14.30 Chairman's Introduction

14.35 Verizon's SDP Experience - Mark Hahn, Principal Member of Technical Staff, Verizon, USA
Verizon is the leading converged operator with one of the largest IPTV deployments in the world of 3M subscribers in Q1 2010, and a mobile customer based of 93M customers. Their Service Delivery Ecosystem (SDE) is fundamental to Verizon's vision of services available across all its networks. Verizon's service vision results in customers considering their services as independent of a particular device and network: whether it be mobile, broadband or legacy networks. Services will be able to access common and shared infrastructure such as an identity management framework; finally removing multiple logons and conflicting security settings which plague most multiplatform services today.

14.55 KPN's SDP Experience - Colin Pons, Senior Strategy & Business Analyst, KPN, Netherlands
KPN vision is to provide services to any device on any network at anytime. Eventually, it moves to "Everything-is-a-Service" model. From a user perspective consistent, on-par (Apple setting the bar) UX is one of the most important buying (and usage) motivation. Customer satisfaction efforts demand co-operation/partnership with others in the value chain, among which are (independent) developers, VARs, users, verticals, etc. Hence, services will encompass assets and capabilities from many
different sources. Critical for this paradigm is fulfillment(including activation, registration, log-on), assurance and billing.

15.15 Panel Discussion: SDP Evolution
• Discussion of issues raised in the the presentations with the audience.
• Are SDPs relevant in a web-centric delivery model?
• Will the multiple SDP silos across mobile, IPTV, legacy and broadband converge?
• Are there gaps in the current standards?
Mark Hahn, Principal Member of Technical Staff, Verizon
Colin Pons, Senior Strategy & Business Analyst, KPN
Lucia Gradinariu, Chief Market Strategist, Consumer Software and Services, Huawei Software Company
Ty Wang, Senior Director, Oracle Communications Business Unit, Oracle

15.45 Networking Break & Exhibition Visit


Thursday 28th Oct 1430-1545: Aligning to Developer Needs Using Developer Communities to Lead the Service Innovation Race
2009 was the year of the app store and developer community.  In 2010 how are we doing as an industry? This session brings together the leading developer community managers with leading developers to frankly discuss what's worked and how to improve upon what has been achieved.

14.30 Chairman's Introduction:

14.35 Verizon's Application Network Interface and Open Development Initiative: Mark Hahn, Principal Member of Technical Staff, Verizon
Verizon is working to tap into the innovative energy of their customers, suppliers, and partners; and to leverage the combined power of IMS, the Web, and attached devices/networks. They have defined an Application-to-Network Interface (ANI) to expose key enablers (location, presence, conference, profile, address book, etc.) such that they are easily incorporated by developers into innovative new services; examples include Verizon's Open Development Initiative (ODI) and Verizon's
Developer Community (VDC).

14.45 Case Study: Orange Partner: Christophe Francois, VP Multimedia Services and Head of Orange Partner
Orange wants to play a stronger role in the applications eco-system. Its Orange Partner program is being reshaped to offer an end-to-end set of services and a comprehensive Toolbox combining various APIs for developers wanting to use the Orange Application Shop as a distribution channel for their apps.

14.55 Practical aspects of Operators 3rd Partner Development Initiatives: Colin Pons, Senior Strategy & Business Analyst, KPN
In theory asking a third party to create a service for your network for free sounds quite appealing from an operator's perspective. But for the developer is it really that interesting? This presentation will explore the practical challenges operators face in working with developers / third parties. What are the viable business models? Can an operator simply copy Apple? And if not, what should be their model?

15.05 Panel Discussion: What are Developers' needs?
• Why haven't operator developer communities taken off like Apple or Android?
• What should / can an operator do to change the situation?
Varun Arora, Co-Founder and CEO of HomeCamera
Christophe Francois, VP Multimedia Services and head of Orange Partner
Sean O'Sullivan, CTO, Dial2do
Colin Pons, Senior Strategy & Business Analyst, KPN
Mark Hahn, Principal Member of Technical Staff, Verizon

15.45 Networking Beak & Exhibition Visit

This old weblog article from 2008 discusses the cost structure of a typical mobile operator, and I show below the structure graphically.  The key figure is transport costs (backhaul) are roughly 7% of total costs back in 2008.  Some operators have seen that jump to over 15%-20% of total costs in under 2 years.  The reason is the tipping point achieved in mobile broadband adoption, discussed in this article. 
Backhaul is the transport link from the radio base station into the mobile network's core.  Its generally leased line (copper or fiber), microwave or metro Ethernet; the choice is highly influenced by the incumbent fixed operator's role in the mobile market, level of competition and local regulation. For example, BT has been aggressive in its metro Ethernet pricing to keep its backhaul business in a competitive market, while in the less competitive French market France Telecom is able to keep backhaul costs significantly higher (outside Paris.)

At the moment we're seeing lots of excitement around LTE (Long Term Evolution), which requires operators to deploy a third radio access network (after 2G and 3G) and a separate core network that is claimed to somehow magically lower operational costs.  Back in 2008 this weblog article discussed that fallacy.  Unfortunately the NEP's marketing engines have kept on rolling in the face of common sense and we're now seeing some operators realize that its not an air interface issue, HSPA and HSPA+ are perfectly adequate for their customers' needs.  Its a backhaul issue, those 3 sectors running at 20Mbit/s require 50+ Mbps of backhaul, while there had only been 8 Mbps in place.  Quadrupling the capacity has doubled / tripled the transport cost, hence the jump in backhaul costs from 7% to 15-20% depending on the market.

To alleviate this problem Sycamore Networks have come up a very smart technology, IQStream - props to Scott Hilton, Talbot Hack, Yang Cao and the rest of the team for their excellent innovation.  As shown below it can provide up to 90% capacity saving in the backhaul, of course the design rule will be more conservative. At least Sycamore Networks are focusing on the key part of the problem, rather than encouraging operators to make decisions not in their best interest.  For the sake of our industry the NEPs must stop conning operators, and act in their customer's best long term interest not their own short term interests.

The Broadband World Forum is the main telecommunication industry's event for broadband, drawing thousands of attendees from more than 100 operator companies and all the top broadband vendors.  Keynotes at the event came from industry leaders such as Hans Vestberg, CEO Ericsson, Jean-Phillip Vanot, SVP of Innovation and Marketing for Orange, and Mika Vehviläinen, COO of NSN.  The plenary sessions packed out and main theater at CNIT in Paris, and at the same time the exhibition floor was packed.

One of the highlights at the event for me was HomeCamera, who I reviewed on this weblog as a start-up to watch, won the InfoVision Award.  Its great to see innovative services being recognized by the IEC at the same level as the big names such as Huawei and NSN.  This was a key theme of the conference, across all the keynotes was the importance of enabling open innovation from third parties to maintain an operator's relevance as a service provider to customers, not just a pipe provider. 

Following this theme I ran a session "Stimulating Service Innovation through the Application Developer Community: Open Innovation".  On the panel were:

• Varun Arora, CEO HomeCamera;
• Christophe Francois, VP Mobile Multimedia Products and Services, Orange Partner;
• Sean O'Sullivan, CTO Dial2do;
• James Steadman, Senior Director, Product Management Oracle; and
• Ian Valentine, CEO, Miniweb.

The panel covered the ecosystem of operator, middleware and developers, so we could achieve an adequate breadth of views.   The panel is also a mix of voice 2.0, web 2.0 and TV 2.0 developers.  There is much to be gained by mobile and broadband operators looking at how the TV guys package their content, and for the TV guys to see the challenges operators face in creating development communities and application stores.  The session was purely discussion, no slideware.  An interactive session with the audience.  I only asked the opening question, the audience and the panel did the rest.

To set the scene I reviewed some of the challenges operators face given their decade long search to work with developers.  I reviewed the critical result of a developer survey I ran earlier this year were 50% of developers who had engaged with operators have given up, its described in the slides I gave at the Cable Labs conference.  Another example is Fonolo, at the 4GWE conference the CEO made a statement I hear too often; "We tried working with operators, it was too hard, we gave up and now go direct."  BTW, Fonolo, is one of Time Magazine's Top 50 websites, I reviewed Fonolo as a start-up to watch last year.  I tried (and failed) to help Fonolo get into operators; the general reaction from operators was "Cool, I love it.  But I'm not sure because...."  I was hoping for the reaction, "Cool, I love it.  Let's get it in the App Store and see what customers think."  Its not just processes, a cultural change is required in being open to innovation; rather than risk avoidance.

I opened with the question, "If you could have one wish to make working with an operator easier, what would that wish be?"  Some of the issues raised included:

• Fair revenue share, with 70/30 being one limit, but operators taking increaing share for additional services such as marketing;
• Speed: short time to get to market, Apple claims the fastest time from code for customer, Microsoft claims 10 days, Verizon Developer Community aims for 14 days;
• Simplicity in the processes for getting in front of the customer.  Most operators hide their customers away from developers, leading to developer frustration.  An operator's core value is delivering a large engaged audience to developers; and
  
• Let customers decide, operators have proven poor in consumer service selection, let's face it they're mostly grey-haired or balding 40/50s males; its not an ideal demographic for 'picking' services.

From that, the discussion moved onto the challenges of:

• Visibility, given Facebook's >350k apps and iPhone's >65k apps; what can operators do to help developers promote their apps;
• Marketing, the importance of the operator to actively market applications;
• Device fragmentation, a critical technology issue for operators to mitigate;
• Value and relevance of customer info, such as phone activity, SMS history, in network / out network, etc; and
  
• Similarities between TV and Mobile industries in the emerging app ecosystem with many insights on packaging provided by the TV industry from Ian Valentine of Miniweb.
  

In the time available we were only another to scratch the surface of the topic, we did not have a chance to cover:

• Charging for APIs (Application Program Interface);
• Charging for testing;
• Enterprise stores;
• Operator in competition with developers, as some operators plan to build their own apps/widgets;
• Store within a store concept, e.g. an Orange store in Nokia Ovi store; and
• Operator collaboration to avoid re-certification, e.g. say Telenor approves an app, why is that not good enough for other operators.

After the session the organizers came in and asked us to move onto the next sessions as the discussion was continuing long passed the end of the panel session.

In a later article I'll review some of the sessions I attended in the Conference agenda which included more than 250 speakers in over 50 breakout sessions, keynote addresses, plenary panels, and workshops.  Sessions such as 'Demystifying SaaS/ Cloud Computing: The Myths versus the Facts' with presenters from Amazon, Salesforce.com, Amdocs, BT, and IDC proved very interesting.

I've reviewed the impact video is having on networks in articles such as :

• The Mobile Broadband Explosion: Mobile Broadband finally reaches the Tipping Point
• The Internet's gone Video: What does that mean to operators?
• Mobile Broadband and DSL Broadband: How do the customers' experiences compare?
• Human Behaviour and Mobile Broadband Pricing

One of the culprits in ensuring video is efficiently served into operators' networks are Akamai, Limelight, CDNetworks, Panther Express, and a host of other CDN (Content Delivery Network) vendors.  We've recently seen a number of initiatives coming from Verizon (Partner Port), AT&T, BT (Content Connect) and Level 3, as they build on their existing enterprise CDN experiences to create video CDNs.

The rationale for a carrier-based CDN is they can place the distributed caches deep in the network, very close to the customer, as far as the MSAN (Multi-Service Access Network), home gateway, or even in the STB (Set Top Box).  Their drivers include:

• Reducing latency of content that their customers request, and operators should know what content their customers like to view;
• Reduce the demand peering is placing on their network as the content would now be in-network reducing the number of router hops, better controlling the required investment in core router infrastructure as traffic grows exponentially; and
• Receive revenue for traffic they already transport.  The logic goes: content providers are already paying for delivery and potentially carriers could provide better CDN value as they own core transport and can place caches close to the customer.  Which to be fair, if an operator can regionally or globally compete with Akamai on price and performance, then such competition is good.  Unfortunately this point has been lost in the emotional net neutrality debate.

Traditional CDNs couldn't get that close without partnering with a carrier and deploying internally (to the carrier's network), which Akamai has done giving it an impressive global CDN.  However, many of the smaller CDNs connect to an ISP such as Level 3 who then peers with the consumer network operators like VZ, AT&T, Comcast.  Hence there is a valid discussion to be had on internet peering commercial relationships which does not involve the content providers nor the customer.
 
In the UK tomorrow the government will release another version of its Digital Britain report, interim version is available here.  So BT and the BBC have been posturing before its release.  Unfortunately for BT, the BBC is the media in the UK, so its lost the argument before it even started with the phrase that will come to haunt all operators on this issue "can't expect to continue to get a free ride."  Specifically BT has been throttling some of its customers in the evening so BBC iPlayer does not work, and naturally those customers and the BBC are a little annoyed, and BT responded with the above phrase to the BBC's questioning.

But let's exame the video CDN market to understand the opportunity for operators.  The video CDN market in 2008 was $400M, of which non-pure-play CDNs like NTT accounted for only $40M.  The market is predicted to grow to between $800M - 1.4B by 2012.  So compared to the $2T telecommunications market its in the noise.  Prices per GB fell by on average 40% in 2008 principally due to Amazon's CloudFront services commoditizing CDN pricing.   CDN vendors are now offering highly competitive deals to customers, such as for high volumes - 400TB and above - are being priced as low as $0.04 per GB.  Live events may command a small premium (10-20%) over video-on-demand streaming content for efficient bandwidth management with pre-determined peak traffic. Value added services such as encoding, web acceleration and traffic reporting command a similar 10-15 percent premium and are increasingly the focus of the CDN providers.

So examining where this market is going:

• Pureplay CDN providers will likely consolidate and will likely acquire content management companies to offer additional content VAS (Value Add Service).
• Operators will partner, acquire and building their own CDNs, e.g. Deutsche Telekom partnered with Edgecast; Level 3 acquired Savvis and the assets of Servcast; and Verizon/BT are building their own CDNs.
• Net Neutrality will limit an operators ability to monetize CDNs in-country, the business case should be built on operational savings.  Internationally the limitations do not apply.  In-country if they're more competitive than Akamai, a content provider may choose them, those they'd best act as a consortium as a content provider need only strike one deal with Akamai rather than  750+ deals if its operator by operator.  BT's statement "can't expect to continue to get a free ride" will limit all operators attempts to monetize CDNs in-country.
• Mobile networks are suffering even more than fixed networks, so will likely deploy CDNs for purely operational reasons, ignoring monetizing CDNs.  This will further weaken the position of fixed operators.
  
• Given Amazon's commoditization of the market, value added services are necessary for differentiation such as analytics, trans-coding, and site acceleration.
  
• P2P (peer to peer) will play an increasingly important role compared to caching, but the technology and its network impact are still at an early stage, see IETF's ALTO project for more info.  Again operators have an advantage is owning the network to provide the more efficient solution.

On the issue of broadband pricing being broken, generally operators are making a profit on most of their customers, only a small minority, between 1-3% are using so much capacity that it makes them unprofitable.  If an operator offers a package with a byte cap limit at a discount for most customers, explains why their pricing is broken, and that most customers are unlikely to reach that limit given their current usage habits, this could be a way of realigning pricing to reflect their network economics.  The key is not to take something away without giving something back to the average profitable customer.

The GSMA reported in August there are now 4 million new HSPA (High Speed Packet Access) subscribers a month.  The total number of HSPA users has passed the 50 million mark globally from 11 million a year ago.  Mobile Broadband is definitely taking off, as discussed in this previous weblog article. 

When I was in the UK in July, I was chatting with a UK Operator's sales person as I installed a pay-as-you-go mobile broadband card in my laptop in their store.  I was asking about the types of customers using the service, how long they'd been sold-out of the ZTE modems, and what returns they see.  An interesting comment was the only returns are when the 3G service does not work at the customer's home, it shows there's a strong fixed to mobile substitution taking place for broadband.

But will mobile broadband provide the same experience as DSL broadband?  Taking a typical 3G roll-out architecture of 3 E1s from a cellsite, which given the recent upgrades in HSDPA to 14.4 Mbit/s means the capacity problem isn't over the air, its on the backhaul, as I've discussed in this previous weblog article.  Given the ATM cell tax, and other framing overheads, the maximum capacity available for the customers' broadband data is about 4.6 Mbit/s.  

Now looking at the figure from a simple MB (megabyte) per month perspective, that gives 1.5 TB (terabytes) available over the month.  Given an urban macro-cell covers between 1200 to 2000 connected customers, assuming 1500 customers means an average 1GB limit.  Which at first glance would appear to provide adequate capacity even if 100% of the customer base were using mobile broadband. 

However, the term I used in the title was customer experience.  The key experience is the many customers watching YouTube or BBC iplayer.  The video you see in the BBC iplayer today is encoded using the On2 VP6 codec at a bitrate of 500Kbps, though they've recently announced encoding using H.264 at 800 kbit/s.  YouTube is a little more sedate 300 kbit/s.

So this means that one cell-site can only support 9 simultaneous On2 VP6 BBC iplayer streams, or 5 simultaneous H.264 streams, or 15 streams of the more sedate YouTube streams.  And that's ignoring all the other browsing traffic (which increasingly includes annoying streaming video adverts rather than easy to ignore banner adverts) and P2P (peer to peer) traffic.  Remember when Tiscali launched in the UK and struggled through inadequate backhaul, even today Tiscali still struggles with customer service.

A critical issue is what are the chances of within a cell-site 10 customers (0.66% penetration) watching a streaming video at the same time during that critical 6PM-11PM period?  Unfortunately the statistics coming from the DSL ISPs (Internet Service Providers) appear to show that chance as significant today.
  
Some ISPs use GE (Gigabit Ethernet) from their DSLAMs into their metro/core networks today.  Compare this to the 3E1s in the example above, which is 0.45% of the capacity of a GE.  To maintain the same experience mobile operators are going to require lots of capacity deep in their network fast, and become more sophisticated than the DSL ISPs in managing the traffic over their 'longer access networks.'  Especially in managing the highly visible streaming video traffic which customers will likely use as a yard-stick to compare ISPs performance in the near future.

A mobile broadband Tipping Point has been reached: HSPA (High Speed Packet Access) is 'good enough' for customers and prices have fallen by a factor of 16 in less than two years.  Three UK (H3G UK) now offers mobile broadband prepay, 10 GBP ($20) buys up to either 1GB or 1 month of access, and its prepay so for regular travelers are no longer subjected to the extortionate 15 GBP ($30) per night internet access charges at UK hotels.  Specifically on the 'factor of 16' data point using Three UK as an example, in '06 the price per MB was 8p/MB, it is now 0.5p/MB (contract package 15 GBP per month for 3GB).  Mobile broadband is growing faster than any previous service, including voice.  Operators are talking about annual subscriber growth rates of over 400%, in one case 100% per month!  It reminds me of the good old 'mobile-gold-rush' days in the '90s, and aren't we supposed to be in a recession?  Mobile Broadband is generally a USB HSPA modem connected to a laptop.

However, the problem is this has happened at the same time as two other trends:

• The internet has gone 'video,' so data traffic is growing exponentially on these broadband ISPs; and
• Computing has gone personal; laptop penetration in some countries is close to 40%.  As data points: the Asus Eee laptop costs between $300-$400, and there will be roughly 40 million laptops sold this year in both the US and Western Europe.

In the UK, the BBC iPlayer is causing fixed broadband ISPs (Internet Service Provider) to complain, customers are now regularly consuming multiple GB per month through their ISP, most of it watching video.  Also new internet-connected HD (High Definition) devices such as the Sony PS3 provide access to games demos and video trailers (all available for free to the customer) where one demo often requires >1GB of data.  The fixed broadband ISPs are now revisiting their network economics.  

For Mobile Operators they the advantage at the moment that customers do not yet expect 'unlimited' mobile broadband access, so the 1, 3 and 7GB limits are not yet a significant deterrent.  However, even with such limits and customers now more readily filling those limits, hence mobile operators must change their network economics from 1c per MB to 0.1 c per MB.  Note, a typical smart phone uses about only 10MB of data per month on average, so laptop access has the potential to increase usage per device by a factor of 100!   The average mobile data bit rate per subscriber was about 10 kbit/s per session, a fixed broadband ISP's average was 25 kbit/s ('07).  Fixed broadand ISPs are estimating their average rate will grow to 70 kbit/s by (2010 or 2011).  The driver as mentioned before is video consumption over HTTP, iPlayer (P2P video), P2P (Peer to Peer protocol) sharing, Sony PS3 downloads, etc.

This tipping point creates a number of opportunities.

On the services side:

• The Mobile web is not just about smart-phones; it's about mobile laptops.  The web is not just about desktop PC access, it's about mobile laptop access.  The use cases are different, hence the opportunities.
  
• With Bluetooth coming as standard in most laptops sold in Western Europe the opportunities for VoIP bypass are significant.  But it will be interesting to see what substitution really takes place.  It can not replace my mobile phone, but it could help save me a few dollars for expensive international calls when I'm settled at a coffee shop.
• Those places where people sit and wait: train stations and trains, coffee shops, airports, in the back of the car, etc. will be far more likely to have sophisticated internet devices connected.  Presenting opportunities in customer service, customer retention, marketing, ways of selling and doing business.
• For enterprises this also changes the mobile office, enabling greater transparency and security of enterprise applications.
• And as discussed at length in other articles on this weblog, provides new opportunities for the Telco API to enhance the web experience of those mobile laptops.

On the network side:

• The core network of mobile operators is going to need to flatten, and do so quite rapidly.
• The backhaul network in mobile operators is already a well covered topic, announcements between O2 and BT show the solutions being adopted.
• HSPA+ is required not for speed, but for the capacity it offers to meet demand in high traffic zones.  HSPA+ was discussed in my Mobile World Congress Summary.
  
• The usual device delays that 3G and HSPA has suffered, may not impact LTE (Long Term Evolution) as greatly as its first application may not be a smart-phone, rather a USB mobile broadband modem powered from the laptop.

Back in September I did an entry on the IDA's IN2015 (Intelligent Nation 2015) initiative.  Quoting from their website:  "The Next Generation National Infocomm Infrastructure (Next Gen NII) is Singapore's new digital super-highway. Next Gen NII comprises complementary wired and wireless networks to ensure Singaporeans enjoy seamless connectivity.  The wired broadband network or Next Generation National Broadband Network (Next Gen NBN) will deliver ultra-high broadband symmetric speeds of 1Gbps and above, to all homes, offices and schools, while the Wireless Broadband Network (WBN) will offer pervasive connectivity around Singapore." 

The Next Generation National Broadband Network (Next Gen NBN) RFP was released on 11th Dec.  Of note is the clear separation of the passive infrastructure (NetCo) from the OpCo that runs the active components.  RSPs (Retail Service Providers) buy wholesale services from the OpCo, and the OpCo rents passive connectivity (fibre) from the NetCo.  It's similar to the UK model where BT Openreach provides the copper, BT Wholesale puts DSL modems on either end and then sells wholesale services to the broadband ISPs (Internet Service Providers).  However, there are two critical differences:

• The copper infrastructure is already there, most home-owners are already connected so there is little build requirement on BT Openreach rather maintenance; and
• The fibre infrastructure may not be point to point, rather use a passive splitter (point to multi-point) to mitigate the financial burden of the fibre access (about 80% of the total network build cost).

The need to build a new infrastructure and the potential complexity of the fibre access is going to require the NetCo and OpCo to work very closely.  It's going to take sophisticated regulation, unless the NetCo builds out a fibre infrastructure with virtually 100% coverage.  Given Starhub (already providing 100 Mbps to customers) and SingTel (will depend on its role, but lets assume its competitive) are not going away anytime soon, this makes the majority of the infrastructure redundant in a perfect competition model.  Even with a S$750m grant, a quick back of the envelope calculation shows that the NetCo will need to wait a long time for payback (>10 years) and is wholly dependent on the performance of the NetCo which does not shoulder any of this financial risk.

Of note in the UK, BT has launched a wholesale product called GEA (Generic Ethernet Access) with rates up to 25 Mbps, definitely enough to provide HDTV and high speed internet access.  So the OpCo and NetCo are bundled together which mitigates some of the operational challenges in rolling-out GPON infrastructure.

In my experience Singapore has a vibrant and extremely competitive mobile market with just 3 competitors.  A simple option could be to license a 3rd broadband service provider to compete with Starhub and SingTel to replicate the success achieved in mobile communications.

Singapore is running an interesting experiment with its IN2015 (Intelligent Nation 2015) initiative.  Quoting from their website:  "The Next Generation National Infocomm Infrastructure (Next Gen NII) is Singapore's new digital super-highway. Next Gen NII comprises complementary wired and wireless networks to ensure Singaporeans enjoy seamless connectivity.  The wired broadband network or Next Generation National Broadband Network (Next Gen NBN) will deliver ultra-high broadband symmetric speeds of 1Gbps and above, to all homes, offices and schools, while the Wireless Broadband Network (WBN) will offer pervasive connectivity around Singapore." 

The plan appears to be creating an 'optical aether' to enable a separation of services from connectivity.  Simply, a service provider doesn't need to worry about the mechanics of reliably streaming a 2 hour HD movie at 16Mbit/s to a customer, because the complete movie is delivered within a few seconds.  In reality the core network is the choke point, as router capacity is not there yet....

On the business structure, the Next Gen NII is an attempt to make broadband access a utility like electricity, gas and water.  Their plan is to have a Consortium (under a PPP, Public Private Partnership) run the network and offer a flat rate connection model for customers, at a similar price to current DSL.  The consortium will NOT act as a service provider over that network.  Of course this is where the business model becomes interesting; to offer a completely new fibre infrastructure throughout Singapore, most probably based upon GPON (Gigabit Passive Optical Network), and make money at a price-point of DSL requires significant innovation.

In Singapore's favour, is an attractive business market, which is still dominated by SingTel, i.e. there's 'margin' available in the business telecom segment.  It has extensive modern utility infrastructure which can in-part be re-used.  And its population density is ideal for just-in-time deployment architectures and technologies. 

A number of business models have been discussed, the chosen one appears to be the Consortium acts as a wholesale provider and retail service providers rent access for their customers (wholesale model).  The analogy I draw is to LLU (Local Loop Unbundling), which has worked very well in Europe, and in particular France where triple-play prices are one third of the US.

However, another option is where the Consortium provides broadband access to customers, and then customers choose their service providers independent of their access provider (retail access model).  Using a utility analogy, as the electricity provider to your TV does not provide the services you watch on that TV, nor should the 'utility' broadband connectivity provider to that TV have a monopoly over those services.

Either way it will be an interesting experiment, and possibly worth testing both business models, where one Singapore region uses the wholesale model, while another uses the retail access model.