3Com boss U-turns on Fortress Europe

Benhamou admits that the continent is back in the competition.

3Com chief executive Eric Benhamou has backed down on his criticism of Europe's lack of competition, but continued to berate the region for its lack of effective internet service.

Giving a keynote address at the Networld+Interop show in Paris, Benhamou claimed that deregulation and competition, particularly in the wireless world, meant that Europe was almost level with the rest of the globe in the information economy.

Benhamou conceded: 'In 1992, I gave a similar speech in which I described Europe as Fortress Europe, because it was missing the boat, refusing competition and keeping monopolies.

But he added: 'Today, Europe is in the running in the global race - it has put liberalisation measures in place.'

However, Benhamou stated that Europe's lack of a robust internet backbone was a hindrance to success in e-commerce or IP telephony for European businesses.

He said: 'The internet does not work as well in Europe as in the US, which has a strong backbone.

'In Europe, each ISP has its own internet backbone, which does not talk to the backbones of other ISPs in other countries,' he said.

'Europe needs its own backbone. If you don't have one, you have unpredictable quality of service and will not be able to drive e-commerce or IP telephony.'

Using a UK-based magazine as an example, Benhamou said it takes UK users a few seconds to access its Website, but users in France experience double the delay and in Hong Kong the wait can be 80 seconds.

'This is totally unacceptable,' he warned, adding: 'Of course, the speed of light cannot be accelerated, but this does not explain the difference in access times. Because the European internet network does not have a decent architecture, if you optimise internet service locally you are missing the point.'

Benhamou said Europe's position in global information had been strengthened by deregularisation. However, he said this was partly the result of problems in other regions, including the economic nightmare in Asia and the stalling of US efforts to open up competition in local loop telephony.

With at least two operators in each European Union country, Benhamou praised Europe for encouraging competition in the mobile communications industry.

But in the US, which lacks a single access standard, mobile phones are practically useless if people cross states.

Speaking out on pricing policies, Benhamou said Europe must also change from being based on cost recovery to being market-driven. He said monopolies had moved on from deciding tariffs based on the cost of delivering the service to users.

Instead, he suggested that tariffs should be dictated by the market or the competition, adding that the arrival of new organisations in the market will help change this. 'I want to see more new entrants - they are more likely to be risk takers,' he said.

Despite giving Europe a pat on the back, the main theme of Benhamou's message was convergence and where it fits into the new economy. He described this economy as having three laws - Moore's Law, which states that processors double in power every 18 months; Metcalfe's Law, which says the more people who share networks, the more valuable the network becomes; and an unattributed law that states the density of light wavelength in a single strand of fibre will double every 12 months, boosting bandwidth dramatically.

Using online bookshop Amazon.com to illustrate the importance of information in connection with the 'new economy', Benhamou said that unlike many of its rivals, Amazon knows the addresses of its customers, what they like to read, when they prefer to buy and how they like to receive their purchases.

All this activity uses information gathered in many different ways, but always employing networks.

Benhamou said 3Com is focusing on four areas of improvement in this respect.

The first is to drive down the cost of administering networks, the second to achieve 99.99 per cent availability, the third to change from a store and forward model of moving data in batches to real-time, and the fourth to manage networks at a policy level based on the users and the facilities they have access to.

'I am the first to admit that our industry has not done a good enough job to ensure high availability of networks,' he said. 'We are closing the gap and this is a key aspect of our strategy.'

Benhamou also highlighted the Internet 2 development project, a pilot to improve the internet that is initially being trialled at educational establishments in the US.

He said the infrastructure has been built and now the work is focused on applications.