After fiber, no one wins selling megabits alone
When everyone offers the same fiber at the same price, speed becomes a commodity. What comes next sells on trust, not megabits.
I spent a good part of my career helping bring fiber to places that didn't have it. That was the game for many years: whoever got there first, with more speed and a better price, won the customer. That game is ending. When everyone on the same street offers hundreds of megabits of fiber at a similar price, speed stops being an argument. It becomes a commodity.
The question that matters now is another: what will the customer want to run on top of that connection — and who will they trust to deliver it?
Fiber and 5G are the road. The value is increasingly in what travels on it. A truly connected home — not the marketing phrase, but wi-fi that works in every room, with the twenty-some devices a family has today, without the customer needing to understand networks. Security and support for those who came to live their whole lives online and have no one to turn to when something breaks. Health, education and work that depend on a stable connection and on someone who answers when it fails.
None of those services sells on speed. They all sell on trust. And that's where the turn I argue for lies: the provider that survives won't be the owner of the thickest pipe, but the brand close enough that the customer hands it their entire digital life — trusting it will be well cared for.
It's a hard change for the sector, because it requires no longer thinking like an infrastructure operator and starting to think like a service and relationship company. Speed gets compared in a table. Trust doesn't. It's harder to build and much harder to copy.
Fiber opened the door. Whoever thinks it's the product will compete on price alone — and price is the worst fight there is.