Independent internet service providers will face increasing competition over the next few years, according to a report from telecoms consultant, Analysys. The report, which restates what most pundits have been saying for years, observes that independent ISPs occupy a precarious position in the food chain, acting as intermediaries between the large greedy owners of networks and the large greedy owners of content. On the network side, incumbent telecom operators that were initially slow to wake up to the internet are now competing hard by using their economies of scale, says the lead author of the report, Philip Lakelin, on the services side, companies such as AOL and Yahoo! are redefining themselves as portals and shifting the main source of revenue generation in the residential sector away from basic access towards content-related services. The good news is that anyone that had enough foresight to start an ISP in the early nineties can now cash in by selling out (CI No 3,595).
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