I had a very interesting conversation with a consulting group called NLogic in Oslo today. These guys provide first rate IP/Ethernet and Network Management skills to the various telecommunications companies in Norway. One portion of our conversation though struck me mainly because I didn’t realize just how diverse the telecommunications landscape was in Norway.
Norway is in somewhat the same situation as Switzerland; One National carrier, a few Tier 2 and Cable TV providers and a slew of Energy companies, municipalities and other organizations that have a telecom portion of their business. Furthermore it looks like the FTTx business gaining marketshare.
One of these companies had just recently passed their 150,000th FTTH subscriber unfortunately I didn’t get the name of which one (it might be private information). Obviously there is appetite in the marketplace for this type of service. The flipside is that one prominent management member of one of these companies said that if they didn;t apply a 10 or 20 year ROI timeframe to this product, they’d be effectively losing money with every customer.
That reminds me of a former PTT in Europe talking to me at a conference about his companies DSL rollout and market uptake by saying,
“The more customers I get, the more money I lose.”
That DSL investment has turned out to be the best move they have made in the last decade. Let’s see if the FTTx installations in Norway prove their worth quicker than they think
