Me quedo con la última frase Julián, "el negocio de banda ancha corre el riesgo de terminar siendo percibido como una utility"... pero me atrevería a decir que no es que corra el riesgo, es que deber ser así, entendida como un servicio básico necesario.

Si miramos hacia el otro lado del charco es precisamente lo que está ocurriendo con las Redes Inalámbricas Municipales: yo, como ayuntamiento, quiero que alguien construya una auténtica Red Municipal, para dar servicio a todos, a bajo coste y en cualquier lugar. Al igual que mi ciudad tiene luz, agua y carreteras, la administración pública puede y debe favorecer esta nueva utility.

Extraido del artículo "The Long Tail" de Chris Anderson publicado en Wired Octubre del 2004.

http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/12.10/tail.html

"... The main problem, if that's the word, is that we live in the physical world and, until recently, most of our entertainment media did, too. But that world puts two dramatic limitations on our entertainment.

The first is the need to find local audiences. An average movie theater will not show a film unless it can attract at least 1,500 people over a two-week run; that's essentially the rent for a screen. An average record store needs to sell at least two copies of a CD per year to make it worth carrying; that's the rent for a half inch of shelf space. And so on for DVD rental shops, videogame stores, booksellers, and newsstands.

In each case, retailers will carry only content that can generate sufficient demand to earn its keep. But each can pull only from a limited local population - perhaps a 10-mile radius for a typical movie theater, less than that for music and bookstores, and even less (just a mile or two) for video rental shops. It's not enough for a great documentary to have a potential national audience of half a million; what matters is how many it has in the northern part of Rockville, Maryland, and among the mall shoppers of Walnut Creek, California. [...]

The other constraint of the physical world is physics itself. The radio spectrum can carry only so many stations, and a coaxial cable so many TV channels. And, of course, there are only 24 hours a day of programming. The curse of broadcast technologies is that they are profligate users of limited resources. The result is yet another instance of having to aggregate large audiences in one geographic area - another high bar, above which only a fraction of potential content rises.

[...] But most of us want more than just hits. Everyone's taste departs from the mainstream somewhere, and the more we explore alternatives, the more we're drawn to them. Unfortunately, in recent decades such alternatives have been pushed to the fringes by pumped-up marketing vehicles built to order by industries that desperately need them.

Hit-driven economics is a creation of an age without enough room to carry everything for everybody. Not enough shelf space for all the CDs, DVDs, and games produced. Not enough screens to show all the available movies. Not enough channels to broadcast all the TV programs, not enough radio waves to play all the music created, and not enough hours in the day to squeeze everything out through either of those sets of slots.

This is the world of scarcity. Now, with online distribution and retail, we are entering a world of abundance. And the differences are profound."

¿Durante cuánto tiempo van a poder los operadores seguir manteniendo el control de los contenidos y los servicios de valor añadido?

Así es, señor. Y Wired siempre tuvo el bendito acierto de mirar hacia adelante.
Ojalá tuviera la misma certeza con relación a la visión de largo en muchas telcos.