Ofcom: France against UK

Last Wednesday night, we were hosting Ed Richards, Ofcom's CEO from UK, as he was discussing Telecom policy, mostly on the Internet. He said that consumers need more control on the Internet and content and the regulators have to convince the providers to prioritize traffic based on applications.

The guy was a lord, sharp and he presented Ofcom's new book, where Eli contributed an essay arguing that the TV regulation will become Telecom regulation and other crazy and innovative ideas, asynch with the present but perhaps synch with the future.
The title of the book is "Communications:The next decade" . I got a complementary copy, killer book; really heavy,with very sharp edges, but very good content.

Going to the juicy and funny part, the audience thought that this guy knew everything on policy, although he was really cool with his answers, the last question bomb was hilarious. As we know France is ahead in the last mile ultrabroadband deployment, when BT is struggling to deploy a 24Mb network. The 'poor' CEO that think was my age, had to defend himself against all this traditional debate between the two countries and having the Americans teasing him and asking him all the tough questions why UK is behind France, even about Ofcom's relationship with Brussels. It really needs guts to give a speech in front of the CITI gurus and fans.
What I really like is that Ofcom is totally independent, so they can blame the politicians, as Ed did for the ultabroadband strategy. UK and BT still live in the box, conservative and secure technology deployments, expected.

E