Recently I attended a talk about the National Broadband Network (NBN) being rolled out in Australia. In part it considered possible impacts of higher bandwidth and faster internet connections.
I am amazed at how poorly this is understood by some sectors - especially many politicians. It may only be rhetoric when they refer to 'being about to download movies faster' but really - is that all they see the internet as being? The world wide web *can* (and does) provide content faster and better than any other mechanism, but it is hardly just another broadcast medium. There are very many, very intelligent people who have been talking for years - starting, I think, with the Cluetrain Manifesto - about all the other capabilities which will be made available with good connectivity.
One good example given in the talk was the Sydney Harbour Bridge. Built at a time when there were very few cars on the road and almost no-one driving, the bridge was designed with four road lanes in each direction and two rail lanes. Way more than anyone at the time could possibly forsee being used. As we now know, the Bridge is now supplemented with another deck for trains and the Harbour Tunnel - and both are only barely supporting the demand. That it is anywhere close is argument enough for building for the future - most other roads in the country are full almost as soon as they are finished.
But that was not the original point that I was going to make. Another point that was brought up in the talk was the possibility of dynamic selection by consumers of utility provider. Most utilities in the country are supplied by one company - as wholesaler - and billed through another - as retailer. I am sure that there is some good business reason for this but I can only see the extra middle-man as being an extra cost on the consumer.
Be that as it may, it leaves the door open for households to change provider, for example for electricity, if some other retailer drops the price. (The providers of course counter this by only offering term contracts). By switching is a lengthy process and not something done yearly let alone daily.
Good internet access and online price lists mean that, in theory, users could switch two or three times a day to take advantage of the minute by minute benefit in prices. The best off-peak price from this retailer and the best on-peak price from that, etc.
Now I really don't think this sort of thing will ever happen. To start with the retailers are too canny to allow their customers to move about that easily. As with phone providers, the utilities are already starting to introduce a 'confusopoly' (Scott Adams term) so that prices simply can't be compared in the first place.
However, the concept introduces the idea of fragmentation of supply. If you were to get your power (or any other service) from multiple providers, would you necessarily recieve a bill from each? This could be very inconvenient, even if setting up direct debits (which tie you closely to your bank - hard to move 20 direct debits to another institution).
So the fragmentation in supply opens an opportunity for consolidation in another area. If all your bills were sent to one service, which provided you with a single invoice - all of which is managed electronically, that would make it enormously simpler for the average consumer. Indeed, it seems that almost all bills in Australia are created and sent from about half a dozen providers which have arrangements with any company large enough to send regular bills. This could be a value-add for them or for any other group that would like to insert themselves as consumer agent. Brokerage groups - who allow you to navigate the confusopolies now - would be another prime candidate for this service.
Thinking back over the above, I think it is only one aspect of a much larger conceptual framework of fragmentation and consolidation discussion. The internet allows consumers to have more control over where they source things - hence fragmentation. But at the same time, they need some method of consolidating those fragments to provide a managable point of view - hopefully more focused on their own requirements rather than the needs of the provider.
Perhaps the discussion above is simply a single concrete example of how this might work in practice?
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