Open networks work
At Freedom to Connect, I was unable to blog Benoit Felten‘s excellent and very popular talk because there was too much in it, and there were some terms I didn’t understand. But I did like the following quotation from Ad Scheepbouwer, CEO of the Dutch telecom, KPN:
In hindsight, KPN made a mistake back in 1996. We were not too enthusiastic to be forced to allow competitors on our old wireline network. That turned out not to be very wise. If you allow all your competitors on your network, all services will run on your network, and that results in the lowest cost possible per service. Which in turn attracts more customers for those services, so your network grows much faster. An open network is not charity from us, in the long run it simply works best for everybody.
Benoit went on to talk about whether the US situation is sufficiently like that of the Netherlands to warrant learning a lesson from KPN. You can see a version of his talk here: 1 2 3 4.
Categories: Uncategorized dw
