David Currie’s Speech to the CMA

Ofcom has released the text of David Currie’s speech to the Communications Management Association.

The speech, which is quite good in terms of details for policy-watchers, is something of a justification for Ofcom’s list of priorities in the areas of the PSB Review, spectrum trading, etc. I found Currie’s discussion of ‘true broadband’ to be the most interesting, mostly because we seem to think the same. Currie says

I am not advocating the replacement of one target (which has actually achieved some good things) by simply a different target. That is my whole point. We cannot lurch from one technologically-determinist target (512k DSL) to another (fibre to the curb/to the home). We need to focus our vision on outcomes. Then work back from there to market incentives and the art of the possible.

Currie and Ofcom Watch are practising the same religion: The goal should be the level of functionality and feature-rich content provided at a certain affordable cost, not the mb/s or as BT likes to tout — the number of broadband enabled exchanges.