Hi, I am a big dumb fat pipe & I am okay with that

If Xavier Niel, founder and chief executive officer of Iliad, the broadband provider behind Free.fr, has mastered the art of cheap quad-play service, then the guys from Hong Kong Broadband Network (a company I have covered numerous times in the past) are just as comfortable selling a lot of bandwidth cheaply and embracing all sorts of over-the-top services running on top of it.

The company that sells a 1 Gbps connection for $ 20 a month is happy admitting to the world that they are selling a “big dumb fat pipe”. I don’t expect AT&T or Verizon or British Telecom are doing that. After all, their copper/fiber is special, handcrafted in factories high up in Italian mountains. The Hong Kong service provider, however, has a different take:

[At] Hong Kong Broadband Network, a wholly owned subsidiary of City Telecom, we are proud to be a Big Fat Dumb Pipe provider, easily handling average bandwidth consumption of over 100GB/month per user across our 600,000 plus FTTH/B customer base.

At HKBN, we embrace Over-The-Top (OTT) content providers who help fill up our excessively Big Fat Dumb Pipes. We happily co-exist with OTT providers, as together we create value for our customers. Our superior bandwidth capability is the LUCA (Legal Unfair Competitive Advantage) that drives our industry leading 17.5% return on equity1,” said Mr. Lo Sui Lun, Chief Technology Officer of HKBN. (HKBN Press Release, PDF.)

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