Back in the early years of this decade, when my wife worked in marketing for a large optical components company and inmedia’s client portfolio was well studded with fiberoptic and next-generation communications companies, it just wasn’t Q1 in our household unless one or both of us were headed to the big Optical Fiber Communications Conference and Exposition, usually held in March at the Anaheim Convention Center.

At one memorable session at OFC2002, Kevin Kalkhoven, who had recently stepped down as CEO of JDS Uniphase, asked how many of those in the room had access to a broadband internet connection at home. About 10% of the hands in the room went up. And this, mind you, in a room full of people whose very business was high-speed communications!

My own hand was not among those in the air, but it wasn’t for lack of desire or want of trying to get a broadband connection at home. At that time, we lived along the Rideau River about 30 kms south of Ottawa. We were more than eight kms away from the nearest telephone carrier central office, so beyond the reach of DSL. Our cable service provider had not yet installed the necessary infrastructure to support an internet service. A very promising high-speed fixed-wireless transmitter was in the neighbourhood and we did fall within its footprint, but, being on the river, we were down in a slight valley and so shadowed from that transmission tower where line-of-sight was necessary. I eventually invested a huge sum in a satellite service that delivered a blinding 640k down and about 128 up.

Kalkhoven went on to describe the market forces he thought were in play that would drive broadband uptake at home. This was in the immediate aftermath of the dot.com meltdown, when massive investments in fiber networks and the hardware to manage them were being seen as utter folly. Thousands of miles of optical cable were lying dark, and some were wondering if those networks would ever be lit.

Kalkhoven told the crowd not to lose faith. Key among the the drivers he identified was what he called “first-inch” devices, a phrase that has continued to make an impression on me both because it was so highly descriptive but also because it was so unusually customer centric. One of the problems with the communications industry, Kalkhoven said that day, is that it refers to that last final link to the end-user as the last mile. “Since when was the customer the last part of anything” he asked, insisting that the link to the customer should be called the first mile.

He then went on to describe first-inch devices, those things that customers hold in their hands that would drive broadband demand. He said that the most popular gift the previous Christmas had been digital cameras. And what do you do after you take a picture with your new digital camera, he asked? You send it to grandma.

Second-most popular gift was game consoles, many of which were internet-ready, meaning players could connect with other players across the net.

Both these new toys were first-inch devices that were going to drive massive demand for broadband in the consumer market, he predicted, and this was before VoIP telephony was much more than a gleam in an engineer’s eye and social networking was something you tried to avoid contracting if you were sexually active.

Fast forward to today, and a Scarborough Research study that has measured a 300% increase in U.S. household broadband penetration since Kalkhoven gave that chat at OFC. According to the study, just less than half (49%) of U.S. households currently subscribe to a broadband internet service, up from 12% in 2002.

Impressive though that growth may be, the U.S. still significantly lags the world. Using a somewhat different index, the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development said in June last year the U.S. had 22.1 broadband subscribers per 100 inhabitants, good for only 15th place among OECD countries. Leading the pack were Denmark with 34.3, Netherlands with 33.5 and Switzerland with 30.7. Canada was in ninth place with 24.9, and the United Kingdom clocked in at 11th place with 23.7.

Technorati Tags: Broadband, Kalkhoven, OFC, OECD, Scarborough Research

Regular readers of this blog will know that we have many a beef with the wireless carriers that operate here in Canada, and we don’t believe the options available south of the border are all that much better. (See here and here.) So I was delighted to see a television commercial Sunday night that scored big points with me on many fronts for Sprint, one of the major carriers in the U.S. I don’t watch much television so perhaps this ad has been playing for a while now, but it was new to me, and I liked it.

First, the commercial was well done. The approach was not startlingly novel; it uses Sprint president and CEO Dan Hesse as the spokesperson for the company and shoots him walking slowly towards the camera in an urban vista. Standard stuff, except that the ad is in black and white, which was the first thing that set it apart.

The second, and far more important, thing was that the commercial did not talk about all the things wireless and other telephone companies usually like to talk about, like network reliability, and service coverage, and call quality and so on. This one talked about what the customer really wants.

Hesse had me at his opening line. “If you could change the way wireless companies did things,” he asked, “What would you do?” Then he answered the question exactly as I would. “Use your phone for all the great things it can do without worrying about the meter running.”

He went on to call it a “wireless revolution,” and “pretty awesome.”

Well, not so much. More like a good idea copied from European carriers that have been selling all-you-can-eat plans for some time now and, like my British colleague Danny’s £35/month plan, at a lower cost than Sprint’s US$100/month Simply Everything plan.

Still, it was refreshing in so many ways.

Hesse was careful to introduce himself as the “new CEO,” telegraphing that the company was going to change on his watch. Further evidence of that change came at last week’s CTIA Wireless show in Las Vegas where he unveiled his WiMAX strategy that he believes gives his company a two-year headstart on its competitors.

The clincher, though, was the final image in the commercial — a lingering slide showing only one thing, Hesse’s email address, dan@sprint.com, presumably an open invitation to get in direct touch with the new CEO.

As your humble servant, I did just that yesterday. The auto-responder kicked back an immediate reply; the real-world response will take a little longer. “A representative from my office” will take “about a week” to get back to me, I was advised. I’ll keep you posted. In the meantime, you can see the ad for yourself.

Technorati Tags: Sprint, cell phones, customer service, advertising

As PR practitioners, we here at inmedia have spent enough time in trade show purgatory to expunge a lifetime of sins. Still the circuit remains a critical element of the marketing mix for many technology companies and we expect we’ll hang many a lanyard around our necks before our time is done.

What we hope to never encounter is the kind of trade show disasters recounted in today’s Network World. Some of the stories here are older ones, but others are quite fresh. I have to say the one I enjoyed the most was the tale of the hapless Dateline NBC producer who tried to go undercover, complete with concealed pinhole camera, at Defcon earlier this year. This security-focused show, which attracts hackers by the hundreds, has got to be ground zero for the paranoid. Needless to say, it wasn’t long before she was identified and ignominously escorted off the premises.

Murphy, who said, “Whatever can go wrong, will go wrong,” clearly went to a few trade shows in his day.

Technorati Tags: trade shows, NBC, Dateline, PR