by Geoff Long
I’ve been attending the annual CommunicAsia trade event in Singapore for longer than I’d care to remember, and each year there seems to be a certain technology or trend, usually upbeat, in focus. The likes of 3G and VoIP would be recent examples. Whether the focus has been achieved by marketing muscle or because there really is interesting stuff happening it doesn’t really matter, at least it gives attendees something to agree or disagree with and discuss.
This year, however, seemed different and if I had to put my finger on what it was that the industry was discussing I’d say it was “change.” Finally, everyone seems to have realised that telecoms is an industry in transition and as such the talk is what the future telco will look like and what it will make money on.
Nokia inadvertently provided a perfect introduction to the week. The Finnish mobile phone giant usually manages to steal a bit of the CommunicAsia thunder by holding its Nokia Connections event a day earlier and cornering many of the region’s IT journalists at the same time. But with a nice karmic touch it was Nokia having its thunder stolen this year with the news that it was merging its networks business with Siemens.
I have it on good authority that most of the Nokia staff were as taken aback by the news as much as the journalists were, and it certainly provided a much more interesting story than consumer segmentation for mobile phones. It also perfectly highlights that this is an industry in transition and mergers among the big name vendors will be one of many consequences.
Another firm indicator of the change came from Matt Bross, BT’s chief technology officer, who pointed out that revenue from residential switched voice minutes now only accounts for 10 percent of its business. “Voice is just another application and we’re busy turning off the public switched network,” he said. “If you defend the traditional model too hard you will miss out on opportunities,” he warned.
That last remark was aimed at carriers that still want protection through the regulators. They believe that too much liberalisation will mean investments don’t get made, and many argue that developing countries can’t afford to completely open up their networks to competitors and other deregulatory measures. Bross, on the other hand, argues that they can’t afford not to.
“You need to open up the network to unleash creativity and innovation. To be competitive in this converged future you’ve got to embrace the globalization that’s taking place,” he said.
Bross was speaking at a roundtable at the CommunicAsia Summit alongside Robert Healey, hardware products group manager Asia Pacific, Juniper Networks, who noted that many of the drivers for the next wave of services were coming from users rather than operators. “It’s all about the content and the personalization and that’s driving innovation. It’s not coming from the service provider community, it’s coming from elsewhere and we have to anticipate that,” he said.
And that seems to scare service providers as much as hearten them. It seems many are still clinging to the idea that the only decent services are the ones they themselves offer at a premium, rather than happily sitting back and watching the traffic grow across the network. I heard one thinly-veiled crack at Microsoft from a regional carrier, who suggested that they come out and admit they’re in the service provider business. On the flip side, I’d suggest telcos need to decide if they’re in the media business, which many want to try their hand at.
Needless to say, IP-TV was one of the hot topics this year. I caught a keynote address by Ofer Weintraub, CTO of IP-TV middleware provider Orca Interactive, who suggested that one of the key selling points for IP-TV operators in future will be integration with existing communication services such as SMS, presence and location. Now that’s something that will no doubt get the telco blood rushing. He also suggested that user generated content, such as video ratings and recommendations, would be part of the innovation that will hit IP-TV. Let’s see how many operators allow their users to call the shots.
And just to cap things off, I heard a related comment from the COO of Malaysian satellite cable provider Astro. He said that trials of communication services such as email with his subscribers had shown that exactly zero percent want comms services on their TV. Apparently they’re just not interested – just don’t tell the IP-TV guys.
It does show that no one really knows what the telco of the future will look like, but at least it will make for some interesting discussions at future industry events.
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