Question for Boxee: Where’s the Bandwidth?

CEN Feature (Jun 1 2010) Cable / MSO

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   Here’s something that should get your mandibular joints twitching. Boxee CEO Avner Ronen this week said that cable operators should really consider dropping their hands-off policies—and the gloves that cover them—and going at each other with over-the-top IP-based offerings.

    

   “That’s what they should do,” Ronen reportedly said. “They should offer Fancast (a Comcast service) and whatever is going to be the brand … to anybody who has a broadband connection.”

    

   Ronen contends that cable operators can use their broadband Internet connections to build new business models that essentially cut the coaxial cord.

    

   “They shouldn’t be afraid of cord cutting. They should encourage it,” he said.

    

   Of course this begs the question: if you cut the cord, how, exactly, does the content get there? I’ll concede that, despite what a company named Boxee might think, all this content doesn’t need to be stored in some on-premise device. The Internet cloud is a great place to park those long tail movies that only someone as odd as me might seek out.

    

   But when everyone starts ordering that content, starts tapping on their computer keyboards or accessing their Internet TVs or even scanning their digital set-tops to look at the latest high def YouTube of that piano-playing cat, how are they going to retrieve it?

    

   Probably over those broadband pipes that Ronen seems to think are unlimited. Those pipes are fiber and coax and bones of contention with an FCC that thinks they should be free and open to everyone and a bunch of service providers who think they should be controlled. What everyone seems to be missing is that maybe controls aren’t the only things the networks need; maybe they need an architecture that goes beyond the metro loop and drops down into neighborhoods to deliver the kinds of broadband speeds and width—get it, bandwidth?—that cable operators, whether over-the-top or not, need to appropriately deliver their services.

    

   For years clichés about the information superhighway and roadkill and every other kind of nonsense marketing folks think of while they’re sitting at their desks late into the evening impressing their bosses and doing little else have soaked up valuable newsprint and Internet space. One thing has always been true, however: the more bandwidth you provide, the more people will use it.

    

   Ronen’s thoughts are just the latest in a stream of consciousness that seems to say that the Internet is bottomless and the consumer’s appetite is ravenous so let’s give them what they want. How it gets to them—and without a cord is even more intriguing—is the question.

    

   Cable operators are looking seriously at Carrier Ethernet to backhaul traffic for mobile carriers who are facing the same conundrum of too much content on too little pipes. It’s probably time—if it’s not already happening—to do the same for their own networks, driving IP connectivity and Ethernet control deeper into systems to make sure that the bottleneck, when it happens, isn’t the cable pipe.

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