38
MOBILE WORLD CONGRESS
ISSUE 03 2014
the delay in AT&T’s VoLTE rollout; the cost increases facing many telcos; the fundamental services gap facing the industry; and the need for new people and processes to meet the new competitive reality. On top of this, most wearables and IoT don’t even use mobile broadband - they use Bluetooth and Wi-Fi.
Mark Zuckerberg’s presentation about saving the world and infant mortality and his subsequent Q&A did not impress, and since then he’s come in for some scathing analysis from commentators such as David Talbot’s piece in the MIT Technology Review.
If a CSP just wants to be an ISP (Internet Service Provider), then go and partner with Facebook and Whatsapp. If instead you want to be a true service provider, then they’re actually your competitors. Building a network is expensive, and needs both the ISP and service revenues aspects. The logic is that simple. Once customers realise they need Internet access, not just a select few applications, the bundling and zero rating we see in emerging markets is no longer needed. Offering free access to services that are reducing your revenues sounds like stupidity to me. All I can assume is many CSPs are happy to become ISPs, and accept the drastic downsizing – likely 80 per cent – that will be required. Put bluntly, an ISP is not a utility.
At home I have three fixed pipes (DSL, fibre and cable) and five mobile broadband pipes (AT&T, Verizon, T-Mobile, Sprint and MetroPCS) – while only one line each for gas, water and electricity. This is a hard problem, and isn’t getting addressed.
WebRTC was mentioned by some of the vendors such as Solaiemes, Quobis, Dialogic, and Oracle, but didn’t raise its head as a wider theme for the industry. Likely the GSMA mandarins haven’t got their collective heads around what it means, though perhaps next year – once NFV/SDN/Cloud visions enter their own troughs of despair and it becomes clear that 5G is still years away.
How much longer do we have to wait for RCS? Yes there are RFPs being issued but every year there are RCS RFPs issued – where’s the customer adoption? At least Orange Libon is moving the story forward. Action is desperately required in IP communications.
Peak voice and SMS revenue was discussed several years ago and the predictions then look correct. Yet the industry still dances around like it’s the good old days of ‘build it and they will come’. Bringing the industry together means creating an event where the best minds of the industry can discuss, generate insight, and perhaps even promote action on the hard problems we face. But the problems are being skipped over to focus on slideware or yet another rectangular computer or fashionable peripheral.
How much longer do we have to wait for RCS? Yes there are RFPs being issued but every year there are RCS RFPs issued – where’s the customer adoption? At least Orange Libon is moving the story forward. Action is desperately required in IP communications
CSPs’ costs keep increasing and revenues are getting tighter. This remains a challenge for most CFOs I talk to: advertising costs keep increasing; the equipment savings Huawei and others brought to the market have subsided; telecom software doesn’t get any cheaper; data centre costs keep increasing as charging moves to storage, not servers, as software gets written more efficiently; and, on top of all of this, wages, electricity, and taxes just keep on rising inexorably. CSP CFOs at the moment are not happy people in my experience.
There is a massive services gap that the wishful thinking around IoT and connected home concepts are not going to fill. Facebook, Google and Amazon are focused on offering their users and customers more and more services. Yet it remains virtually impossible to get CSPs to launch new services – the effort involved is far too high. This is a fundamental problem
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40 |
Page 41 |
Page 42 |
Page 43 |
Page 44 |
Page 45 |
Page 46 |
Page 47 |
Page 48 |
Page 49 |
Page 50 |
Page 51 |
Page 52