This week I was at Medienforum NRW 2011 in Cologne to give a presentation on the technology behind LTE and also had the pleasure to attend a number of other presentations and discussion rounds as well.
One that surprised me in particular was a session on net neutrality. One of the participants and keynote speakers was Fritz Joussen, CEO of Vodafone Germany, a charismatic man that knows how to argue and entertain, in the company since the very beginning back in 1992. I expected to get quite a critical view on net neutrality from his point of view but was quite surprised about the following thoughts:
When asked if it is a good idea to charge content providers for access to the network or higher quality of service he said that he doesn't think it makes sense to develop a network "against the customer with the content provider" (" […] gegen eigene Kunden mit Inhalteanbieter.")
Further he said that he is of the opinion that if services are prevented to reach the customer the market as a whole will not happen ("Wenn Sie Dienste verbieten, wird der Markt hinterher nicht passieren").
And then: "I know where my money comes from, it comes from my subscribers".
And for those of you who speak German and still remember Boris Becker commercials for AOL back from the modem days I found this statement quite amusing concerning LTE and rural deployments: "Das ganze Dorf ist drin!" (sorry, no translation possible, the joke would be lost).
Makes sense. Research we have done with operators indicates they don’t see much, if any, opportunity to monetize 3rd parties by charging for preferential access. And *all* of them are much more focused on increasing the penetration of data subscriptions in the base — what drives data subs? Er, facebook, email, google, all that kind of thing
Bin ich schon drin? Ich bin drin!
Quite an interesting and surprising view indeed.