Is Co-operation the new competition or another word for procrastination?
The IBEC Telecommunications and Internet Federation (TIF) telecommunications forum on Monday 21st Septemberwas certainly interesting. Having moved back from the UK after ten years in telecommunications there, it was interesting to see what issues exist for the Irish market in terms of getting connected and broadband access nationally.
The short version is (stop me if you have heard this before):
- Everyone agrees that they need to pool resources and create a consistent broadband network for next generation access.
- Trouble is no one wants to pay for it in the hope someone out there will fund this.
- Chances are nobody will do anything
- Everyone will hear the same issue come up next year.
The benefits are clear; this new network would unlock Ireland’s potential and entrepreneurial base, which according to Dr Ronnie O’Toole of NIB, technology sector sees the highest concentration of start ups and the most likely to develop the Irish Google or Nokia and establish Ireland as a centre for IT excellence and indigenous.
The realities of such a vision does some major obstacles. Minister Eamon Ryan focused on the Irish government being a facilitator to help the operators reach an agreement. No one disputes the need to have this network but who pays for what and who gets access were the sticking points. Eircom’s new chief executive, Paul Donovan kicked off the debate highlighting that Ireland’s operators are not in a position to create their own separate networks. The point was reinforced by on by Tommy McCabe of TIF, who asked how it would be delivered and paid for in the current challenging climate. The debate swung from the government should invest to how the operators needed to front up the money, which Paul Donovan was quick to note that Eircom had invested over 1.1 billion euros in infrastructure and would continue to do this to upgrade fibre, but needed a way to work with everyone else (everyone else contributed an average of 700 million euro). Not everyone was so minded, Robert Finnegan of 3 stated that although they shared sites, they did not see the need to collaborate any further.
Outside during the breaks, there were wildly contrasting reactions as to progress being made or if this was déjà vu. Some of the attendees predicted we would still be in the same situation next year as no one wanted to give ground and risk giving a competitor the upper hand.
I think Lord Carter who spoke put it best when he said that ultimately a ‘deal space’ needed to be put into place where all the parties came together in a relatively risk controlled environment (from my reading, I think that is polite speak for locking everyone in one room until they agreed, but that is just me). In their separate spaces (the telecoms industry, Comreg and the Government), consensus on anything looks unlikely. The problem of procrastination is that the pressure builds as we seek to attract Foreign Direct Investment and our infrastructure is critical particularly with the big bets in data storage and cloud computing.
Will the need to get out of recession and get jobs mean we might finally have the dealspace, or will 2009 be the year of procrastination?
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