For telcos, the SMS feature was a happy – and extremely profitable – accident with the Short Message Service feature designed as a control channel for the mobile voice networks.

The Short Messaging Service cost almost nothing to develop and quickly became a massive profit centre for mobile phone companies.

Today in markets where smartphones are dominating sales, people are moving many of their communications away from text messages over to Internet based services like email, instant messaging and social media.

Interestingly, in the United States text messaging still growing although at a slower rate than previously. This makes sense as the US is behind countries that have fully adopted 3G networks and subscribers don’t get the full benefit from a smartphone without a reliable and fast data service.

For developing countries, we’ll probably see SMS continue to grow as the attractions of a relatively cheap and simple communications channel like text messaging still make sense in markets where data plans are expensive and smartphones scarce.

As revenues from text messaging drops, we’ll be seeing more telecommunications companies try to replace the lost income with other services. Expect to see more offers for various business and home service bundles and offers to upgrade to the latest phones or packages as providers try to lock profitable customers into cash generating agreements.

The era of accidental profits for telcos is over, the quest for these companies now is to find how they can maintain profits in an era where data services are commoditising their lucrative product lines.

For the managers of these companies, the challenge is on to successfully do this – it remains to be seen how well they do in refocusing their businesses.

A hundred years ago this year the iconic Australian horse coach company Cobb & Co went into its first bankruptcy as it declined from being the dominant transport service of rural Australia.

Cobb & Co was founded in 1854 by four young Americans in the Victorian gold rush and grew around the expansion of Australia’s rural farming and mining industries. By 1900 the company had 9,000 horses travelling 31,000km (20,000 miles) every week.

By 1924 Cobb & Co was gone. Displaced by the motor car and restrictive state government rules designed to protect their railways.

Many businesses, including the management of Cobb & Co, thought the motor car was a fad. No doubt many at the time also thought electricity was dangerous and unnecessary.

Business worked fine as it was when stagecoaches carried the mail and bullock carts carted the crops, steam engines were fine to power the farms and businesses while the telegraph was just fine for those times when a three month letter to your customers or creditors in London or New York wasn’t quick enough.

All those businesses went broke. They didn’t go broke fast, it was a slow process until one day owners realised it was all over and then the end came surprisingly quickly.

That’s where many of us our today – cloud computing might be the latest buzzword, social media might be a distraction for coffee addled children of the TV generation and the global market might be just a way to dump cheap goods and services on gullible consumers – but markets and societies are changing, just as they did a hundred years ago.

Sure, your business doesn’t need fast Internet. Business is fine.

Stage coach image courtesy of Velda Christensen at http://www.novapages.com/

That’s pretty typical of most webinars, but I can’t help but think we’re doing this the wrong way by falling into the trap of appliying old techniques to new technologies.

In most industries we fall for this problem; when the motor car came along, our forefathers applied the ways of horse and carts to the new technology, going as far as calling them “horseless carriages”.

The movie industry is probably the best example of this. When movies first appeared, producers and writers applied theatrical techniques and it took a decade or so for them to figure out how to work best with the new media, then they had to relearn for talkies, followed by the arrival of TV and now the industry is adapting to Internet streaming.

In many ways we’re still in the “silent movie” phase of online presentations; we’re learning through trial and error what techniques work while inventing new tricks that take advantage of a personal screen.

So that gives rise to the question, how do we adapt our presentations that are designed for being presented to a room full of people to a more intimate online medium?

The podcast of the program is available for download or listening to from the Nightlife website. Some of the programs and online services we refer to on the program are listed below.

Last year’s Sensis e-business report found over two thirds of Australians had made a purchase online. Increasingly, customers are using the web to find shops and services rather than the phone directory or local classified adverts that local businesses have relied upon in the past.

At present only half of all businesses have a website despite customers using the net as their main way of researching purchases and finding local merchants. This is partly because of the cost, time and complexity involved in setting up a web presence.

Today it’s possible to set up a free website in half an hour and be listed on the main local search engines within an hour.  On the March ABC Nightlife Tony and Paul looked at how to get online and use these tools.

Aspects we discussed include;

• Can you really build a web page for free
• What’s replacing Yellow Pages
• How do businesses list on these services
• Are they a substitute for a web page
• Do consumers actually use local search
• How to remove Norton 360
• Protecting yourself online
• Dust build up in systems
• The next version of Windows

Our next spot is on April 28. Visit the events page or subscribe to our newsletter to keep up to date with other ABC segments we might be doing.

Useful Links

Some of the software and webpages we discussed on the program included.

Getting Australian Business Online
Adding your website to Google Listings
Listing your business with local search
Norton 360º Removal Tool
Windows Scripting Host (for Windows XP)
Malwarebytes virus and spyware removal tool

If you have any suggestions for our April 24 show, please contact us. We love to hear your ideas and comments.

If you are in Sydney, our Web for Beginners seminar still has spaces available. In three hours, you’ll have your business online with an effective Internet presence.

We’ll be taking listeners’ calls to debate, explain and discuss the issues, costs and technology questions surrounding this massive project.

Please note that this segment will be going out on the ABC Local Digital Network in capital cities as the Commonwealth games will go out on the analogue network.

If you are outside of the capital cities, you can stream the program through the ABC Nightlife website. If you’d like to join the conversation with your questions or comments phone 1300 800 222 within Australia or +61 2 8333 1000 from outside Australia.

You can SMS Nightlife’s talkback on 19922702 or twitter @paulwallbank using the #abcnightlife hashtag

Our previous discussions on this are covered in our Freeways of the Future article and presentation.

Some of the topics we’ll be looking at include;

• if we choose to go with the est $43b broadband fibre to the door policy – does this mean they’ll be coming along digging up the street to lay cables into every yard?
• if we don’t do this but choose to rely on wireless connection from hubs – what does that mean for reliability of internet connection?
• how do any of the options compare to the current speeds Australian cities, and rural and remote regions have?
• are we over-building if we proceed to take fibre to every household in the country?
• are we simply ensuring that we will be ready for expansion of services on the internet?

The show is live at 9.00am Australian Eastern time and will podcast on the Life Matters site shortly afterward.

Privately developed communications networks are rare in the nation’s history for a combination of factors including Australia’s population distribution and commercial appetites for investment risk.

Australian governments have always been critical to the development of regional communications, from the establishment of state operated railway networks, through the post office owned telegraph and telephone networks and eventually the road system.

So the National Broadband Network is typical of Australian communications development where the government provides the infrastructure framework and the private sector grows around it.

There’s no doubt regional communities understood the importance of being connected to the global economy, successive Federal governments have struggled with a patchwork of government programs such as the Universal Service Obligation and Broadband Connect in an effort to guarantee some level of service for all Australian communities.

The NBN itself was conceived in the realisation that any solution that relied wholly on private funding was not going to deliver a national solution. This was view that regional organisations such as Digital Tasmania had held all along when agitating for their communities not being left behind.

And Tasmania was were the vote mattered, the coalition failed to win any Tasmanian seats where three would have been won had the state followed the rest of the nation. Those three seats; Bass, Franklin and Braddon would have been enough to give the Liberal and National Parties power.

Had the coalition focussed on the legitimate criticisms of the NBN such as the government’s failure to quantify the $43 billion price tag or NBNCo’s failure to produce a business plan then they may well have won the election.

As the country Independents stated, the NBN was one of the key considerations in their decision to support the Labor government, so not getting their NBN policy right cost the coalition government in two ways.

Now the NBN is going ahead we need to focus on what it can deliver, along with a sensible discussion on the right mix of fibre and wireless infrastructure, the proportion of private and public investment and exactly how much the project is going to cost.

Now is the time to get on with building what will be the 21st Century equivalent of the roads and railways of the 20th and 19th Centuries.

This column first appeared in SmartCompany. Since writing it, I’ve also done an ABC spot on the National Broadband rollout.

The more I research and reflect on the proposal, the more I’m convinced this plan is a winner; assuming it goes ahead.

I’m also more convinced than ever that Telstra is the big winner from the proposal as it relieves them of the Universal Service Obiligation and means they can avoid the massive costs of maintaining and upgrading the copper network. Not to mention the likelihood that the government will end up leasing space on Telstra’s existing fibre network.

Jim Collins in his book “Good to Great” coined the phrase BHAG, or Big Hairy Audacious Goal. Few goals are bigger or more audacious than spending $43 billion to run fibre to every house, office, school, farm and factory in Australia.

My first reaction to the national broadband plan was disappointment – on Twitter I commented “there goes the Rudd Government’s final strand of tech credibility.”

Having had time to think about the plan, it’s clear I was wrong. The announcement is a huge change in policy and it will have immense ramifications on how we do business.

Fibre-to-the-premises completes the gaps in our communications systems. When the rollout is complete, we can rely on our internet links and assume our customers and employees have the same dependable connections.

For regional enterprises this is great news, as it will bring the world to the door to some of Australia’s best industries and businesses. It levels the playing field between big and small businesses, regardless of their location.

For Telstra, the result is mixed. While it means more competition in regional areas, it also means it can save billions on upgrading the aging copper network. The criticism of the rollout’s cost ignores the massive replacement cost already required to replace the old phone lines.

While perhaps not good news for management, the proposed break up of Telstra is good for shareholders. Sensis and BigPond, for example, would be worth far more when not shackled to a company fixated on maximising revenue from a ramshackle copper network.

Another great change is in Canberra’s communications policy. Australia has suffered from communications and media being tied together, with the interests of well connected commercial groups being more important than good planning.

The Keating government’s disastrous cable TV rollout was an attempt to provide modern infrastructure while appeasing the dominant media tycoons who saw technology as a threat to their empires.

As a result we got a mess and the cable TV networks, which could have provided this infrastructure 15 years ago became a political and financial quagmire, which delivered little of what was promised.

We shouldn’t understate the social benefits of the plan either. As the recession bites, the need for skilled and unskilled labour to build the rollout will assist in keeping unemployment down.

It’s certainly billions of dollars better spent than propping up shopping centre developers, banks or the manufacturers of cars that no-one wants.

The biggest change though is ideology. Until now, it’s been difficult to imagine a government proposing a massive infrastructure project without the ticket clippers of the merchant banks and other cronies skimming a fat share.

In every respect, this is the best communications plan and one of the most visionary ideas we’ve seen out of Canberra in generations. While it’s going to cost, history will show it’s money well spent.

Whether the broadband rollout becomes reality or not, fast, reliable communications are already a business necessity and will become even more so.

Think about what fast broadband means for your business and plan how you can take advantage of it. Those who don’t grasp the opportunities are going to be left behind.

So have a think about it. You might come up with some BHAGs of your own.

Coupled with the increased downloads we’ll see from the uptake of smart phones, we’re seeing the end of most Australian ISP’s business model of soaking users with excess use fees.

iiNET has done a deal with the ABC that traffic won’t be counted for their customers using the ABC’s service and you’d have to wonder how long it will be until others offer it.

The interesting thing with IP TV in Australia is just how badly the commercial TV stations are falling behind.

A good example is Channel 7 where their tie up with AOL should have made this easy, but they seem to have lost it. The other two networks have nothing.

Under the current pricing structures it’s difficult to see IP TV taking off in Australia, but this will change. The big question is just how visionary Australian Internet providers are and just how the commercial TV stations will deal with the challenge.

Early this year Three Mobile touted their own report which found Australians were reluctant to do surfing the net on their phones due to the risk of copping a monster bill.

Sadly this belief is quite fair when you see some plans charging up to $3,000 a Gb if you go over a 5Mb monthly allowance.

While Optus has sweetened their plans slightly by offering better usage allowances on their iPhone plans, all the providers have done little to improve their mobile phone data offerings.

This stingy attitude to data by the Australian mobile operators is going to continue to cramp the growth in the Australian mobile Internet market.

Until one of the players drops their restrictive plans and outrageous excess use charges Australians will quite rightly shy away from embracing mobile web surfing.