At a recent event to promote the UK BSG’s ‘Pipe Dreams’ project, the first question put to the government minister for Competition, Stephen Timms MP, came from a mobile operator. He questioned the project’s fixation on fibre.  Even as a self-confessed technology enthusiast, “I speak as a geek”, but also from his 3G perspective, he could not see evidence of an increased need for even greater speed.

On the same day at an Ofcom/CMA seminar on BT’s 21CN, there was criticism of BT’s websites.  Voicing a plea for ‘lite’ versions a delegate pointed out that many of us were increasingly inclined to use mobile devices for Internet access and these websites were, apparently, far too content-rich to be easily accessible via PDA’s.

These contrasting observations demonstrate that with increasingly diverse markets, where customer requirements range from anorexic to obese, one size does not fit all.  But they also illustrate how we see things differently simply because we are coming from different directions. 

Umpteen hours of debate have just been triggered by Ofcom’s consultation document on Next Generation Access.  The industry’s finest regulatory brains are now busy beavering away to formulate responses by early December.  Much of this high-flown consultation could, however, be seen as completely irrelevant in the greater globally-warmed scheme of things.  Listen to Dr Pachauri, chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPPC), and you will get an entirely different perspective on regulatory priorities.  The green agenda has more than sufficient persuasive power to put the lid on less urgent distractions. 

Meanwhile, back in the comms room, grand strategic visions do not impress - no matter how much money is being thrown at core network migration.  We are now two years on from a fundamental shake-up in ‘equality of access’ for service providers – the folks who derive their services from the dominant wholesaler.  What business network managers, ‘customers’, would appreciate is a Service Level Assurance that actually means that the service is assured.

Future promises of a get-well plan do not compensate for the anxiety and cost of crisis management.   Slowly, gradually, service providers in this delivery chain seem to be convincing themselves that service can be redefined as a optional event that may occur depending ‘on matters outside of our control’.  Is ‘matter outside of our control’  a new scientific definition of a wholesaler? 

So although the Climate Change lecture was really nothing to do with telecoms, Dr Pachauri’s choice of a concluding quotation from Mahatma Ghandi, seemed entirely relevant to the lives of network managers.  It might even give regulators food for thought. 

"A technological society has two choices: first it can wait until catastrophic failures expose systemic deficiencies, distortion and self-deceptions.  Secondly, a culture can provide social checks and balances to correct for systemic distortion prior to catastrophic failures". 

If regulation is about ‘checks and balances’ then maybe we should expect regulators to rebalance time spent on strategy and practice.  Maybe we should ask for less time playing futures and more time checking service delivery realities – and holding defaulters to account.  Maybe we should demand a better balance between decorating expectations and making some effort to work out if anyone can really believe the basic data on broadband availability.

Maybe Ofcom’s declared aims of encouraging innovation, enterprise and competitiveness can only be achieved if we get a lot better at seeing things differently.

This editorial was first published in NetworkingPlus magazine, October 2007.