Just like an Uber driver turns his or her car into a taxi, so the Velvet user becomes a mini neighbourhood telco. A home user can effectively create their own network, and become their own mini provider. The idea is that retail customers who install the hotshot box, and who have any surplus data in their plans, can onsell that to other people. The company, called Velvet because its founders want to deliver a smooth experience to users, has only received one round of startup funding from the Queensland University of Technology’s BlueBox fund. Velvet was founded in Brisbane by a young tech entrepreneur who, you guessed it, calls his company “Uber for telcos” but in this case the claim, conceptually at least, can be justified. The origins are humble enough, but Australian start-up Velvet has come to the market with a device it calls a “hotshot,” which sits on top of existing routers with owners able to decide how much data capacity they want to share each month. This would appear to be a difficult status to achieve, but I have to confess that I am more than a little interested in the latest company touted as the telecoms equivalent of the ride sharing juggernaut. The other description, which has rapidly become a platitude, is that this or that company is the “Uber” of the telecoms industry. Please people – disruption is so 2013 or 2014! We’ve all got used to, and probably sick of, talk about disruption and disruptors.Īny new company entering the market which looks for any attention at all will instruct its public relations spinners to tout them as the latest disruptor on the block. Revenues are down, traditional carriers are re-inventing themselves as technology companies while technology companies go OTT and are encroaching more and more on traditional telecoms revenues. The telecoms industry is in an incredible state of flux – that is a given. This article was authored by Lachlan Colquhoun, and was originally posted on.
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