Broadband News

Sylvain Thevenot can understand why many people believe his appointment last autumn as TalkTalk’s senior director of products and strategy means the ISP is aiming to launch a mobile broadband service.

After all, he comes direct from Vodafone where he worked across Europe rolling out new messaging and voice products, most notably answer phone messages sent to recipients as email. However, Thevenot points out that if people want to look at what he hopes to achieve with TalkTalk they might want to look at his background of consultancy at Microsoft and, crucially, before that having set up Bordeaux-based Quaternet. It was one of France’s largest dial-up ISPs when it was sold, making his partner a lot of money but not him, “I was a minority stakeholder and didn’t make much money, me and the other guy aren’t exactly friends any more!”

Hence he cautions he sees himself, as does TalkTalk, as equally well seasoned in running ISPs and helping a computer giant such as Microsoft partner with ISPs, just as much as working in mobile telecommunications.

“I can see why people would think I’ve been brought in to set up a mobile broadband service,” he says.

“That’s still potentially a long term aim but we’re going to be doing a lot more in 2009 that probably won’t involve mobile. The problem with coming from Vodafone is I know how greedy the mobile phone networks are and the tiny margins the mobile virtual mobile network operators have to work with. So it’s not as high a priority for us right now as several other tasks.”

IPTV plans

Perhaps the most far-reaching of those which Thevenot hints at is a potential IPTV launch from TalkTalk which will see it first allow users to tweak their connection to prioritise data according to their personal needs – in a similar vein to Eclipse and Be’s traffic tweaking options.

“We’re working very hard on getting the service as robust as possible because we believe that to offer video over the internet the minimum speed and overall quality of the connection is just as important as the headline speed,” he says.

“We’re going to allow people to set up their connection for how they want to use it. It won’t be just for gamers but for everyone to shape their connection to their own use.”

This will come before the culmination of current negotiations with television set top box manufacturers and video content aggregators which Thevenot believes could lead to TalkTalk offering an IPTV service before the end of 2009.

“We’re talking to set top box makers, such as Canvas, and, as you can imagine, we’re also out there talking to content aggregators,” he says.

“It’s true that people could just use an ISP to go to aggregators’ sites but we think where an ISP can add value is discovery. We can help people discover all the content that’s out there and bring it to their television, not just their PC.”

It is for this reason that Thevenot reveals TalkTalk has become the country’s largest local loop unbundler.

“As you go up in speed to offer HD you find that the connection can become less constant and you get peaks and troughs, that’s why we’re working on ensuring that we get a service that never dips below 5 to 8mpbs. You need an end to end service; the only way you can do this is local loop unbundling. It’s what we see our big advantage. Sky will talk about this but they don’t own the entire connection in the same as we do when we unbundle exchanges.”

Tweaking options

 In the meantime, whilst these negotiations take place and unbundling continues (Thevenot estimates TalkTalk now has 1700 exchanges covered) the next moves TalkTalk is likely to make is allowing subscribers to tweak their own connection according to their primary use, be that gaming, web browsing or streaming videos.

Thevenot also reveals the ISP is working on allowing subscribers to have their voicemail emailed to them so messages can be picked up from anywhere in the world.

His work in launching similar services across Europe for Vodafone will be useful here, he believes, but if he believes there is one thing that his past that is going to shape how he shapes TalkTalk’s strategy it is in working with other companies.

“The ISPs could really learn a big lesson from the telcos and software companies and realise that they need to move forward through partnership,” he says. “I think the ISP industry is pretty weak at combining services from partners to differentiate themselves. That’s what I think I can bring to TalkTalk.”