Choices and Voices in Communications
In my interview last week with Fon founder Martin Varsavsky, we discussed how Fon’s ambitious community WiFi service would get along with incumbent telephone and cable companies. Martin argued that Fon was actually a good thing for these operators, because it extended the connectivity radius of their customers. Sounds like Martin and co. are making headway. GigaOm is reporting today that Fon has struck a deal with Time Warner Cable to encourage cable modem customers to share their connections through Fon.
This is a good sign for Fon, but also for the transformation of communications generally. The future of connectivity is not about parallel platforms doing the same thing (although more competition in last-mile broadband would be a good thing). It’s about multiple platforms doing different things, which link together to provide comprehensive user experiences. The reality is that no one telecom company will ever have a truly ubiquitous global footprint. And even if it did, it couldn’t possibly serve all the different needs of its users. We’re used to thinking of communications as all-or-nothing. In fact, we all use networks to communicate in different ways at different times. I don’t need a highly reliable honking big pipe to check my email on a train, but I do to watch a live football game in high definition video. And sometimes what matters to me is not what I’m connecting to, but who among my friends or colleagues are communicating with me.
Thus, today I have a cable modem account (for home broadband), a wireline phone account (for home telephone), a VOIP line (for home/office telephone), a Skype connection (for telephone and instant messaging), a mobile phone account (for mobile calling), and a wireless data account (for mobile email and web surfing). Sure, I could combine some of them, and other people might desire the convenience of fewer providers more than I do. In general, though, communications will become more fragmented and complex, even as it becomes more social and (unfortunately) more consolidated as an industry. It will look, in short, something like the consumer Internet industry today. The key dimensions are the increasing complexity of choices (to match the diversity of user desires), and the increasingly social nature of the experience.
