Broadband Experiences: Adding Value to Access Services

The session Broadband: Adding Value to Access Services at CONNECTIONS™ Europe will track the growth of broadband services and their transformation from service providers to “experience providers.”

Broadband has had a transformative effect on how European and U.S. households communicate, consume entertainment, and organize the CE in their homes. At the end of 2008, nearly 60 million Western European homes (34% of homes) and more than 160 million households worldwide had basic home network configurations.

With these high-speed connections, households are able to acquire and manipulate media in new and unique ways – uploading and sharing video, sharing photos online – and the true challenge for service providers is to avoid the impression of being just the pipe or mere amalgamators of different services, an entity that does not command loyalty and is interchangeable with its competitors. They need to assume the role of an experience broker, one that provides exclusive and unmatched access to a variety of different and innovative service combinations – and fulfills a role in the home not easily replaced.

To this end, several carriers in Europe have been aggressive in their RG deployments, particularly in France, Italy, and the U.K. The home networking efforts by telcos in Europe are going beyond data to incorporate multimedia and voice applications, which will give them an expanded presence in the home and help build new relationships with their customers.