This weekend I finally bit the bullet and caught up on a stack of reading, and came across this National Journal article that is now available outside the paywall. On this blog, we often write about how complex today’s Internet, broadband, and backbone networks are, and how their complexity and interconnectedness are creating new waves of innovation and products and services for consumers.
Consumers are empowered by so many new innovations. They have new tools and services for home security and energy efficiency, as well as new choices for video services, gaming, and entertainment. These tools and services are mad available by a multitude of providers and diverse companies, and as these choices grow exponentially in both quality and number, study after study indicates that prices for broadband and wireless services are going down.
That’s why it’s frustrating when the media, as National Journal did with “special access,” looks at issues from the “old world” of telecommunications without considering how quickly the market has changed. Put simply, special access is a term that regulators use for a subset of data services that companies like Verizon offer businesses and other communications providers to use our networks to meet their own customers’ wireless, broadband and other data needs.
If you read the article, titled, “The Other Duopoly,” you might think that the marketplace for these data services is some throwback to the rotary-phone era. This is just wrong.
More than 50 different companies – national, regional and local – are competing and offering high-capacity services to businesses. In Verizon’s top markets alone, there are at least nine other competitors. And the competition isn’t just traditional network operators that split market share. Innovators are getting into the market, offering new technological alternatives. There are competitors, especially in the wireless space, building fixed-wireless (fiber and microwave) networks for special access business. Cable companies are in the business, too.
In this day and age, technology and innovation allow a company like Google to compete against a company like Verizon one day, and then partner with us the next. This dynamic market can be a head-scratcher for reporters or policymakers who want to fit companies into the old cookie-cutter style models they are familiar with. But it just doesn’t work like that any more – not for consumers, not for companies that innovate, and not for policymakers. We all need to view the communications space in a different way. The special access market – with lots of competitors and new technologies – is competitive. It’s too bad National Journal chose to portray it differently.