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Digital Cities: PacketFront talk
Submitted by acohill on Mon, 04/18/2005 - 14:39.
PacketFront is a vendor of network equipment designed specifically for community broadband projects. Matt Wenger, an expert in communitywide broadband and senior analyst for the company, gave the talk.
Wenger strongly advocated a services orientation for community broadband projects. His thesis throughout the talk was the current connection-based model used by the telcos and the cable companies discourages innovation and use of broadband.
Wenger spoke at length at the connection between broadband and economic development, and said, "If you don't have a broadband strategy, you don't have an economic development strategy." He went on to show the connection between small business job growth and the potential for broadband to increase small business jobs in the community.
Wenger had some good case studies that led to his proposition that a focus on services is most likely to be successful. He advocated letting a particular service (like VoIP or video on demand) determine bandwidth needs and quality of service, and those two factors in turn determine price. A wholesale model encourages innovation and service growth, and revenues go up for the network owner (the community) with a service-based model. Wenger illustrated how revenues tend to go down using a connection-based model.
Packet Front
I think there is much to learn from the Swedish experience over the past 5-10 years, from their STOKAB experience in Stockholm (where the City installed the infrastructure for environmental/cultural rasons, passing its capacity along at cost), to some of the next generation efforts where the cost of switching from the fiber backbone was unduly complicated and expensive, to their current experiences on Lake Malaren where they seem to have improved operating economics. The Swedes are doing a good share of the world's R&D in the general area of community communication systems. Would be interested in reviewing other comments on this particular presentation.
Don Samuelson
Chicago
Swedish trials
[revised 9/1/2005] A company called B2 Broadband burned through nearly a billion dollars of VC money during the dot-com bubble. One of the original B2 Broadband investors was Cisco, which walked away from company. The money was spent in large part on a cutting edge community broadband project in Sweden, where the company learned that network equipment designed for corporate networks (e.g. everything Cisco makes) does not work well in a community environment. Which is why you don't want institutional IT managers in charge of community tech projects, by the way.
Out of that experience a group of engineers and managers created PacketFront and in my opinion, the company is now set to become a leading provider.
B2 Broadband/PacketFront confusion
Being one of the co-founders of PacketFront i just want to clarify a few things that seem to be slightly confusing.
PacketFront has NOT burned through nearly a billion dollars in VC capital. What acohill is describing is what B2 Broadband, who is a leading broadband provider in Sweden, did together with Cisco during the dot-com bubble days. In 2001 a number of key persons from Engineering and Operations within B2 Broadband jumped and founded PacketFront together with some of the key account representatives from Cisco. What we have done is to take the experience from the journey with B2 Broadband and design and develop a completely new solution for the network infrastructure that is purpouse built for broadband networks: Triple Play, Automation, Control&Provisioning.
So, the founder team have great know-how and a lot of experience from the provider side of business coupled with the know-how and experience from the leading technology vendors (Cisco, Lucent, Ericsson etc) and we continue to combine this knowledge as we grow our company.
But you are right in the fact that we are the leader.
Richard Jansson
Thanks for the clarification..
I received the original briefing on Packetfront from a third party, who obviously compressed the history of the company and its background. Thanks for clearing this up.
For the record, I think PacketFront has some of the best networking equipment on the planet, and anyone designing communitywide broadband networks should put PacketFront on the short list of vendors. My experience with Packetfront folks has been stellar--quick to respond to queries, extremely helpful, and very willing to listen.
....
Thank you for your feedback.
I know that the story of PacketFront´s background have been quite easy to misinterpret in some of our introduction presentations. I had Asian customers who first thought we were a joint venture by Cisco and B2 Broadband....which is quite not the case as you know. But it is still important to have the audience understand how we have mixed the core competence of the team with both operator and vendor experience.
Being quick, responsive and willing to listen is really a trademark for us....the day we stop doing that we are just another vendor among many...
Best Regards// Richard
richard.jansson@packetfront.com