Reznik pointed to the irony in that to some extent the bigger the pipe that telcos provide the more acceleration of internet services that they enable. He said the NBN will take us to a fundamentally different level where it's all about sales, service, bundling and subsidizes of consumer electronics.
"The RSP have an interesting opportunity to redefine the game and the value provided by the company supplying the telecom service," he said.
Khoong emphasized the challenge moving forward will be to understand the customer as the customer base becomes more sophisticated and more complicated to serve. Now consumers are the leader in adopting innovation while before it was the enterprise segment.
"Trying to watch the consumer and figure out what he wants and deliver that will be very tough, so having insight into your customer will be the differentiator," he said.
Rarendran said that as a potential RSP in Singapore he's interested in learning about demographics in Singapore, which is an important ingredient to being able to deliver health care, education and SOHO services.
Looking at ways to monetize services, Ng said in the short term he doesn't want to be totally reliance on the NBN by delivering quad-play type services, noting that a lot of the services he is planning don't depend on an NGN with 100-Mbps connection.
"Having the bandwidth it offers gives us the opportunity to watch that development and as it becomes more pervasive, I can start to offer other services that can really ride on this bandwidth," Ng said.
"Once I hit a certain scale, then maybe I can subsidize so they become more pervasive. But between now and then, I'm going to tread fairly carefully."
Because many firms will want to focus on the innovation and not think about access, OpenNet's Chew believes there is an opportunity for an ISP to play the virtual operator role and ensure the consumer never has to deal with the opco and the netco.
"It will be about branding their reliability and customer service. This would give the consumer a single point of contact, with seamless service cutting across the three layers and reduce complexity," he said..