Selling Practicality

Jeff Ooi opines:

"Broadband ISPs should realise that they are not in the business for charity, or to champion narrowing the digital divide. Their duty is to rollout broadband services in areas that should drive the country’s economy and global competitiveness.

Big organisations that have embraced Internet revolution should know how to deploy broadband without much delay. Residential users would not be contributing much to the national penetration grid. They are the rich esoterics. I feel that ISPs peddling broadband should develop this neglected segment, traditional industries which are facing severe shake-ups due to technology change. ISPs should sell them not just a broadband account, nor just connectivity. I think it will be better if they partner with application service providers to offer broadband-plus services."

Jeff has hit the nail on the head here. He continues:

"I can also immediately sense opportunities for our colour-separators, a sunset subset of the printing industry, to start marketing their services using broadband. They could receive finished artworks from big overseas publishers and deliver the colour- separated printing films across broadband Internet. As an added service, they could also provide secure FTP (file transfer protocol)services for their clients - and clients’ clients – such as storage space for their pre-output printing film materials, which could be efficiently transmitted via broadband by now."

We need to network and form working partnerships between ourselves urgently. State governments must give top priority to local ICT companies when it comes to state ICT projects. A public-private partnership is crucial to success. This must be visible to all of us without further delay.