Columbia's Internet Access Efforts Relevant to Countries Such as Thailand and Malaysia

Camilo Alberto Jiménez Santofimio

Solving key business model issues often is easier when one can access the experience of other actors in different markets. In other words, what Iliad's Free Mobile was able to do with "Wi-Fi first" access was helpful to other providers in North America, for example, and also has reinforced the cable TV industry's determination to do the same as it enters the U.S. mobile business.

Of course, scale matters. Where U.S. mobile operators have made successful entry into the U.S. entertainment video business, that is because the market is big enough to support such efforts. 

Language and culture populations sometimes are not big enough to create a significant opportunity for many service providers in smaller countries. 

That same scale requirement will likely affect which parts of the Internet of Things, smart cities or machine-to-machine services business various suppliers can envision. Access is not so much the issue. Most ISPs will have at least some potential role in the access realm. 

Scale to enter the applications side of the business is something else, again. What might be feasible for China will not be so logical for most other countries in Asia, which lack a large internal market. 

Likewise, what might be possible in India or Indonesia might not be so feasible in Sri Lanka or Bangladesh. 

In that regard, Camilo Alberto Jiménez Santofimio, Comisión de Regulación de Comunicaciones, Colombia, Senior Advisor, who will be speaking at the Spectrum Futures conference in Singapore, 19-21 October 2016, comes from a country whose state of development, in terrms of Internet access and economic development, is similar to Thailand and Malaysia.