Hamish MacEwan

The first thing I asked myself is “why this lack of disruptive thinking in competitive and new entrants to the broadband market?” Having examined this in-depth, I think it comes down to essentially two things:

• First, most of the competitive operators’ senior decision makers are people who previously worked for the incumbent. They have, by and large, carried their legacy thinking with them. They view the market as a battlefield, but the rules they understand were set down by the incumbent. So disruptive thinking is as anathema to them as it is to the incumbent’s decision makers: radically tilting the battlefield or shifting the conflict to another battlefield feels to them like destroying the market they know and love.
• Second, most of the disruption that can be achieved in the broadband market involves heavy, long-term investments in infrastructure. When you’re putting that much money in the ground, you are naturally risk-averse and this averseness makes you less likely to embrace disruptive thinking. As a consequence, you tend to compete with the legacy providers on their terms, but you’re unlikely to change the rules of the game.

And yet there are examples of very successful disruptions in the broadband market

Remind you of UFB?