We’ve finally finished a complex research project at Yankee Group that produced something very simple: a measure of how the Anywhere revolution is advancing throughout the world. You’ve heard that old Mark Twain line, ‘If I’d had more time, I’d have written a shorter letter’? This was our version of making the time to write the shorter letter.
‘If it’s worth doing, it’s worth measuring’… that’s another old dictum, although I’m not as certain who first uttered that one. But as analysts, we have to believe it; otherwise how can we correctly attach counsel to foresight? So if the world is moving to ubiquitous connectivity–Anywhere, in Yankee Group parlance–and that revolution matters as much as we believe it will, some of the most fundamental questions are these two: Where? When?
The answer depends on a comprehensive understanding of current and future broadband availability to the world’s population: whether via the wired connections of cable or fiber, or the wireless connections of burgeoning 3G and 4G mobile broadband networks.
[Or even satellite, as 03b Networks, the latest heavily funded attack on expanding Internet access to emerging markets, aims to do. Will this approach help accelerate the Anywhere Network's reach from our prediction of 2 billion of the world's population by 2012, to something closer to 5 billion, as their targets imply? My own money would be on 4G wireless reaching the most remote new users first.]
Where we invested the time to make things simple included grouping the world’s regions by their per-capita broadband ratio. Once broadband penetration crosses the 1:1 point–one broadband connection per citizen–the Anywhere Network has become both sufficiently high in capacity and pervasiveness to be truly transformational in our lives, letting us take our experiences with us wherever we go. (And it’s worth saying that 1:1 isn’t the end state; as connectivity is integrated into the devices we use, that ratio will soar well past that point.)
YG analysts Carl Howe, Wally Swain, and Vince Vittore collaborated on this work, featured in this report on our website. Want it the easy way? Here’s the webinar: audio (mp3) and slides (pdf).
If you want the really short letter, it’s this: By next year, the world will have its first Anywhere Economies. At Yankee Group we have no time to waste in helping anticipate the transformations that will unleash.
