Cook’s Collaborative Edge

from the Register: BT promises to improve local loop services for rivals
Ofcom acts…
By John Oates
Published Friday 27th October 2006 11:12 GMT
BT has been given permission by Ofcom to draft in extra engineers to help improve service levels at Openreach - the division charged with helping rival telcos get equipment into local exchanges.
The […]

Insights into Where and How Value is Found in the Internet versus the Telco Point of View
Hendrik Rood and Marco Westenberg Interviews on FTTH in Holland
This combined issue begins with an essay on detrmining the economic value of the Internet. There follows two essay reviews of Eric Beinhocker’s new book on complexity economics, The Origins […]

A Look at How the Definition of Value and its Means of Creation are Rapidly Changing

In the ‘Internet Age’, value is the ability to create and transmit content. The exercise of value generates wealth. What must be sorted out is what is understood by value. This introduction proposes some fresh answers to this very specific and important question. To understand where we want to go we must have a sense of where we are.

Thinking About a Meta-web

We are in the chaos of the most significant change since the industrial revolution. It is not just PSTN versus Internet, nor analogue versus digital, nor mainframe versus PC. Nor is it centre versus edge. The Internet causes a cascade of secondary effects that are bumping into and reshaping commerce on all levels, travel, education and the physical layout of our towns and communities. What we think of primarily as changes in communications spill over boundaries and wrap us into a web of new relationships.

A vast number of newly interconnected relationships is now possible. The technologies enabling the webs of relationships are evolving more rapidly, creating new tools and new processes. We are enmeshed in so many new pathways, from which flow new
information, that seeing the big picture of the entire system is not something most people consider possible or even de-sirable. From within each individual ‘silo’ of one’s life and career, one sees only a portion of the whole. When one pushes, the pressure points holding the web together push back and little happens – everyone defends his base, his foundation – namely, that which he knows will support him. Who will understand the whole, as a system, see the links, see the value, and design strategic non-zero-sum directions? Who will be the explainers, the weavers and the orchestrators who see how to build new structures? Those who understand the possibilities may be able to find where the value lies, and develop and nurture the value that is changing all the time.

When will we see that the future we want lies outside the box of our old thinking? Are we not so well trapped inside n the our respective boxes that we don’t have a view of the ongoing metamorphosis of our world? Trapped inside the box, we see only the greedy telcos and the corrupted Regulatorium.

Policy by the People Will Drive Telecom Infrastructure Change
Cook’s Edge: This is the best framed most cogent statement - at a global level - of where we are that I have ever seen. It is by Jim Kayne who described himself in a phone call this morning as a carpenter from Vancouver […]

David Isenberg asked about a comment from Holland saying that the vote in the parliament was not quite unanimous. Dirk Van der Woude Amsterdam civil servant and fiber expert responded to my Symposium mail list:
I happened to listen to the voting, a colleague was present on the parliament’s public gallery.
BOTH votes were unanimous, the […]

Talking with a friend in Europe just now who said that I had missed something critical (along with Reuters and AP).
Both motions passed parliament unanimously. Including the second one. The second has huge potential significance - according to my friend the parliament has mandated that all telecom networks in the Netherlands be […]

It happened.
James Enck wrote: “It will come as little comfort to the Dutch cable industry when, as predicted by the front page article in today’s Trouw, the Dutch parliament votes later today to regulate cable on an equal basis with KPN - imposing an obligation to unbundle access for third party services, and, I assume, […]

I apologize for not doing thorough research on this. Others I know are doing just that and the results will be available in Europe in about 15 hours from now. But read the following for some hints on the nature of the train bearing down the tracks at the foreign media owners. […]

James Enck writes this morning: Just in literally seconds ago, French bad boys Iliad have acquired Paris metro-FTTH newcomer CiteFibre, a very sensible acquisition of assets and talent in light of the company’s bigger goals.
UPDATE: Palladium Club uber-mega value reader alerts me to some very interesting background in French here (mirrored here).
Click here Uping […]

Dirk van der Woude from Amsterdam tracks what is going on in European fiber builds like no one i have ever seen before. I published his July version in my September COOK Report.
Here is his October 2006 version.