Chasing Rabbbits

Fiber Frogger

After dealing with years of “Xfinity’s bullcrap” as customers, a pair of brothers built an all-fiber ISP that’s cheaper & faster to compete with them.

A great example of the leapfrog effect.

Typical development follows a more or less linear path.

Let’s use telecom to illustrate:

Developed countries follow that ladder stepwise, one rung after the other. But developing countries skip rungs, essentially speed running the development to curve to whatever the most accessible current state is.

China has everything apps because it didn’t establish a robust economy atop landline infrastructure. If you jump straight into mobile phones as portable computers vs. mobile phones as cordless landlines, you view the technology with a different frame of reference—a different perspective. (Ed note: I like em-dashes, that wasn’t an LLM thing (nothing against LLMs))

Now, back to the quote from Kottke above that started this whole thing…

In the US, most of the big telecom players have been climbing this ladder as it’s been built. Ma Bell and all that.

This typically means accruing the IRL version of technical debt and some degree of corporate bloat over time. Add in a dash of stock market management and you get a recipe for easy disruption on consumer value.

A new entrant can jump straight to the cutting edge and leverage accumulated industry knowledge to offer better value, leapfrogging the established / entrenched option. (This is especially the case in monopolistic scenarios, like telecom.)

At all times, you can either be the leapfrogger or the leapfrogged.