One of the striking realizations of my Analyst career was when I found out that very often companies in the broadband ecosystem defend, or even lobby for positions that they assume to be in their interest for ideological reasons, but without having worked out rationally if indeed they are. I have many an anecdote about crestfallen faces when real numbers are worked out and exposed.
And in fact, this has long informed my own approach to research: the idea is, based (ideally) on hard data or failing that on documented modeling, to assess whether a policy position actually makes sense or delivers what it’s supposed to deliver. This was the genesis of our short report Net Discrimination Won’t Buy You Next-Generation Access (still available, dirt cheap) in which we modeled a top-down revenue share between OSPs and ISPs to figure out the financial impact it would have. Long story short: not a lot, and certainly not enough to shift the lines in terms of network investment (as often argued by ISPs).
Fellow analyst and provocative thinker Dean Bubley has just gone one step further in what I consider to be a groundbreaking piece of analysis entitled Non Neutral Mobile Broadband Business Models. In this report, Dean doesn’t look at the classic arguments for or against net discrimination, he examines in-depth which business models net discrimination would enable and how much revenue they might generate.
You can get a feel for the material that’s in that report through the following presentation he’s made available on Slideshare:
The report is thorough, very well documented and enlightening. A highly recommended read.
Photo (cc) by Tax Credits.