Last week I was very pleased to be a guest of the City of Den Haag (capital of the Netherlands) and to be the keynote speaker at what I believe is their 6th annual Telecoms event.  My presentation was entitled, "Why Open Access Networks - the detail of conventional telecoms" and you can view it here.  Unlike most such gatherings, this is a short, sharp, and sweet affair - lasting a mere 3 hours with a handful of speakers and this year, more than 420 invited attendees.  It was a scorching hot day in the Hague - and the atmosphere was even hotter in the church where the event was held by the time I had finished.

All the presentations were streamed live to the internet and you can re-live the entire experience if you wish from here.  Only three of us spoke in English - Esme Vos of MuniWireless, Konstantinos Apostolatos, Director of Arthur D. Little Benelux and myself.  I  understood chatting with various people after the event that KPN's speaker (Paul J. Hendriks, General Manager Business Broadband Services) who followed me, was using the word 'open' extremely frequently in his presentation but with that special meaning that only incumbents tend to use!  (see my earlier blog on this redefinition of the English language).  Esme was her spendid outspoken self, making clear that in the US at least, there is a voracious appetite for new, open access and city-wide 'free' wireless networks.  Her presentation is certainly worth looking at.

But I save my draw-dropping astonishment for what the assembled audience heard from Mr Apostolatos.  Knowing Arthur D Little from the great old days when, in their Boston headquarters at Acorn Park, they had some of the most creative and disruptive technologists of our age.  I was somewhat taken aback by the extent to which this organisation now appears to be more of a mainstream 'keep the clients content ' consultancy.   Fair do's Mr Apostolatos did honestly acknowledge that ADL's recently published broadband report on EU developments was sponsored by a competitor of KPN - and so I supppose such sponsorship needs a modicum of balance.  Or as Konstantinos put it,  "I have good news for the telecom industry and I have bad news for the telecom industry."   You can watch and listen to Mr Apostolatos in person and also download his presentation, but there is one choice quote I offer you:

"There is no such thing as a business case today for fibre to the home (FTTH).  You can calculate it any way you like - it doesn't pay off today and it won't pay off for the next five years and it may not pay off for the next ten years.  You will see that FTTH will remain after 2011 and 2012 roughly 10-11% of the overall access market. ...there is more than enough broadband either present today or planned in the next few years in order to take care of all the needs that we have for the next years.  We have spoken for this report to a few thousand consumers and more than a hundred experts all over the world and it is fairly clear in the most optimistic scenarios, most of us normal human beings, will not have ten digital televisions at home at the same time so we will not need 200 Megabits per second bandwidth - sorry."

You know, when I was at the Harvard Business School many years ago, I am pretty sure that one of Arthur D Little's major clients was the Digital Equipment  Corporation (DEC), also located in Boston and founded by Ken Olsen who was described by Fortune magazine in 1986 as the 'most successful entrepreneur in the history of American business'.  Now I never met Mr Olsen, but I feel I know him well as I made reference to him in my presentation in the Hague and quoted his infamous prediction made in 1977 that, “There is no reason for any individual to have a computer in their home.”   I now  wonder now whether that may have come from an Arthur D Little report for DEC and not from the mind of Ken. 

200 megabit access capacity?  That's as crazy an idea to the general public as was the notion of travelling at 25mph when George Stevenson invented his 'pointless' steam engine.  Me thinks someone at ADL has their head in the sand and needs to start getting it around fibre!