Lock, Stack and Bytes

I landed (literally) in Silicon Valley in the fall of ‘99. It was a wonderful time. There was the “tech boom”. The stock market was in full spree. Brian Cooley sounded like a beautiful bird chirping away on sunny mornings. But very soon things started going downhill. The “boom” went “bust”. The economy just slumped. People started getting laid off. During those tough days, I remember observing a few things in the valley that I thought was…well…strange at best. Yesterday, while reading Russell Beattie’s posting - Where’s the Mobility? - I got reminded of my “strange” observations.

I mentioned the other day that I thought Silicon Valley would eventually come to dominate the mobile services space. I still believe that, but it doesn’t look like the established leaders have gotten the idea yet - it’s obviously going to be left up to small startups to lead the way in this area, which is fine. Netscape wasn’t an HP project after all.

I first noticed that the leaders of Silicon Valley are *still* behind the times when I saw the line up for O’Reilly’s Web 2.0 conference. Not a single member of telecom industry there and only one session that talks about telecom - and its focus is VoIP. Are you kidding me? Anyone who doesn’t realize by now that the Web 2.0 is going to be dominated by mobile devices must be living on, well, here in the U.S….

Back to my “strange” observations: I remember that for a good part of my first year (99 - 2000) in Silicon valley, I was still surfing the net using a 56Kbps dial-up connection from home. Ah, but I was getting the same bandwidth from my ISP back home in India! Back then, within the Indian IT industry circle, people were talking about high-speed internet connectivity using ISDN, cable modems, DSL, ADSL technology among other things. Of course, all this talk was based on the trends coming out of U.S. high-tech industry. And here I was in Silicon Valley (Santa Clara, to be specific) - the cradle of high-tech innovation, the haloed ground for knowledge workers - barely chugging along at 56Kbps. Besides that, there was the small matter of having the option of choosing among competing ISPs. Well, Pac Bell (now SBC Communications Inc.) was the only option we had for more than four years. And that was the case till about a month back. The early DSL services were offered somewhere around late ‘99 or early 2000. The price was exorbitant - I think it was well over $50. One would think that in time, at least, we would have other options in the vicinity. Road Runner, Excite@Home (one of the victims of telecom industry’s excesses during the “boom”), someone…after all this is Silicon Valley. As a matter of fact, Excite@Home had its headquarters approximately 15 miles away but no service in our locality! But still, the fact was that we had no options. Whatever happened to competition, choice for customer, capitalism, blah, blah, blah.

Here we are now - mid 2004. The scenario is not very different. The cost of DSL has gone down somewhat (mid $20s/month from nearly $50/month when we first availed of the service) but so has the customer services, generally speaking. And for those who don’t want to sign up on a yearly contract - people like me who are planning to move - the price remains the same - nearly $50 per month. A few things have changed. Pac Bell is now SBC Communications Inc. As far as more options are concerned, we have a variation of SBC in SBC Yahoo!. However, almost exactly a month back, Comcast brought our local cable company (Castle cable). So, now we have an authentic non-SBC option - finally! High-speed option of as much as 3Mbps! Come to think of it, for almost three years, our “neighbors” half-mile down the road had high-speed internet services from AT&T Cable services (eventually taken over by Comcast) but we were only allowed to sniff it! Took a while, but we are getting some options now. I guess, it says something about corporate America and its absolute aversion to risk - especially in down times. And then there is the bureaucracy. FCC and the Telecommunications Act of 1996. Doesn’t help corporate America. Doesn’t help innovation. Meanwhile, a few thousand miles away, in South Korea…

- Rajesh