Source: Comms Business October 2009
'When I was running an ISP in 1999 the fastest modem
we had connected to the Internet was 56Kbit/s. In September 1999 BT
announced plans to deploy ADSL across several hundred UK exchanges that
would offer download speeds nearly ten times faster and today ADSL is
offered by multiple suppliers from nearly 6000 exchanges and with
download speeds up to 40Mb - over 700 times faster. The improving
coverage, reliability and speed of broadband soon made it a vital
product for resellers but until around 2005 most were content to sell
broadband for direct ISPs and take a commission.
Following
the management buy-in of Griffin in 2005 I looked in Comms Business and
besides Tiscali and BT there were no ISPs advertising and nobody was
talking about broadband. Griffin had invented managed broadband for BT
Wholesale two years earlier but had done little with it in the channel.
ISPs dealing direct to businesses soon saw their reseller-sold broadband
as a way into selling services to those customers that competed with
the channel and in October 2005 Griffin re-launched MOPS at Convergence
Summit as a white label portal for the channel.
We
embarked on a campaign to educate the channel of the dangers of letting
competing brands into their base and the value of selling broadband
under their own brand. Four years later Griffin is the #1 ISP to the
channel and most major resellers have their own broadband product.
What's more Comms Business is packed full of ISPs that have jumped on
the white label bandwagon and it seems that every other article is about
NGNs or convergence.'