Chill out! The telcos have done a great job

Content wouldn’t be king without broadband. And broadband would be a waste without the content. It has now become a ‘virtuous’ cycle of one driving the other. There are now 162 million websites (one form of content) worldwide. That sort of content both sustains and requires a huge broadband services and equipment market.

Broadband technology related chips - whether used in core infrastructure or the CPE devices - generated $8.4 billion in 2007. There are other allied equipment segments also that have grown due to broadband. One segment that I can immediately identify is 802.11x market. We are seeing growth in WiFi equipment mainly to access broadband from devices like laptops, PDAs and mobiles.

For VoIP and IPTV type applications, broadband is a pre-requisite. It took years for telcos to bring broadband services to the market. While the bloggers like us may choose to endlessly blog about mobile and web 2.0, the fact remains that broadband is the single biggest telecom success story of the past 10 years.