Tuesday, October 23, 2007

How to sell fiber / Comment vendre la fibre

I was recently attending a conference abroad where someone brought up an interesting point that got me thinking. The speaker was saying that we spend too much time trying to sell broadband. Instead, we need to sell people on what they can do with broadband. Essentially users don't buy lines. They buy services.

A lot of my planning recently has been how to convince people in the community that they need fiber. Maybe that's missing the point. I should focus on things they would be able to do with fiber that are not possible with standard ADSL - particularly where we are.

The big question for me (and probably the rest of the telecommunication world) is what are these services? What services could attract a 70-year old couple in the village and make it worth it to pay a little extra for fiber services?

4 comments:

Rudolf van der Berg said...

hey Tad,

From what I've seen there is no killer ap. For families with kids it's the increased performance. For yuppies it's getting something better for a small fee. For some its the sense of community and flipping the bird to the big telco. Onsnet in Nuenen worked very much on a sense of community and the idea that for the same price you got more. They put a small sign in every frontyard that signed up to stimulate the sense of community.

Tad said...

I agree that there is no killer application yet. That's making it a bit more difficult to sell the idea to people. Someone I know recently came to visit from Japan where he's on assignment for work. He subscribes to 100 Mbit/s broadband over fiber but said he can't really see anything different than a connection at 24 Mbit/s.

Certainly the upload speed would be a key difference between the two (ADSL vs. Fiber) but it's obviously something he's not noticing. It would just be nice to have something to point to other than multiple HDTV channels on demand.

I like the idea of the sign in the front yard too. I wonder if my neighbors would go for it.

Unknown said...

Very nice comment.
----------
juliana

http://mls.fastrealestate.net

Anonymous said...

http://www.buy-fiber.com/