We like to think that our world - this comms business - is more like Formula 1 than Green Bowls:  dynamic, terrifyingly fast, cutting edge design, fiercely competitive, often risky, and rather more than merely dashing.

We like to think that.  All around there’s plenty of evidence of disruption and change as new technologies make their market impact.  The acclaimed winners are the new heroes of upheaval.

But we also know that it can take decades to become ‘an overnight star’.   The celebrity headline recognition only arrives after an age of ignorance.  When the penny finally drops, when the mass market wakes up to a new way of doing things, many folks get left behind wondering what happened.

And so convergence arrives with a vengeance.   In any great transformation there is no guarantee that the prizes will be shared out fairly.  One of the problems of banging your head against brick walls is that when they finally crumble you are left dazed and stumbling across the rubble whilst others call out ‘thanks mate’ as they leap across.   

Economists and researchers, particularly the consultants employed by regulators and governments, are often mystified by the unevenness of innovation.   Why do things take off sooner in one country and not in others?

The consultants usually come up with answers that are far removed from the everyday realities of making stuff happen.   As a result, the major players, governments and regulators have only recently begun to fully appreciate the pivotal role of the Channel - knocking products and propositions into ‘fit-for-purpose’ shape, understanding customer needs, spending most of their time educating the market and the rest of their time re-educating manufacturers and service providers.

It’s the strength, diversity and inventiveness of the Channel in the UK that is raising customer expectations of all-IP services.  There’s a momentum that is now racing ahead so fast that it cannot be held back by the promise of a Next Generation Network arriving like BT’s 21CN in 2010.   And yet we are also trailing other countries.

The local loop unbundling process got underway in France long before the UK – and the consequences of that can be seen in the relative progress towards IPTV.    Back in 2005, Free Iliad’s €30/month package didn’t just buy 6Mb/s broadband with unlimited local and national phone calls but also included 60 TV channels.  OK – its not available everywhere and, now  in the UK, whether we are buying a call package bundled with broadband or the other way round, there are also inevitable cherry-picking deployment programmes.

Time then for the Channel to start thinking beyond basic convergence to the next round of infrastructure transformation.  All-IP is a done deal but we cannot all get anywhere near enough of it.  Are we really going to have to wait around yet another decade for some higher authority to eventually think about dumping the Megabit-strangling copper and fix fibre for everyone?  When will we start catching up with Korea and Japan?   Has the Channel a role to play in bringing new investment and innovative ideas – the hard slog that’s needed to create a new high-capacity market dimension? 

Some might have thought that technology commoditisation – the convergence – would lead to fewer intermediaries.  But the Channel thrives because, like any ‘ecosystem’, it has the diversity and competitiveness to constantly reinvent itself.   The CMA, whose members spend around £13bn a year on networked products and services, has often in the past looked at the Channel as supply-side agents for the major manufacturers and service providers.  But, particularly amongst SME’s, there’s now a much greater recognition that it is in the Channel that they can find comms management capabilities that only larger firms could afford in-house. 

So now there’s yet another dimension for the CMA – and one that is increasingly recognised by those concerned for driving UK economic growth and prosperity.   Can the energy and expertise in the Channel ‘ecosystem’ enable and accelerate a really massive upheaval?  Can this ecosystem be mobilised to drive fundamental infrastructure change and not hang around waiting for dinosaurs to wake up?

Beyond convergence, who will be the new heroes of upheaval?

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First published in Comms Business, October 2006