With my first post done, I thought it best to try and provide a little substantive content. Two years ago, I spent some time interviewing various CEOs, strategy and regulatory directors in various international communications companies to get their thoughts on the big issues that were coming up. With the end of the year approaching it seemed like an opportune time to revisit that research and reflect on whether those issues were still current, and therefore worth continuing to follow.
At the time of the research, our over-riding thesis was that the telecoms industry was going undergoing structural changes that meant that regulatory structures well-suited to dealing with steady-state markets were being overwhelmed by the changes confronting them. The market and regulatory result was likely to be similar to that experienced when other step-changes (competition, mobile telephony, broadband, etc) impacted on the market – confusion and delay. Events over the past two years (even putting aside the small matter of the global financial crisis) would appear to have validated that idea.
The themes identified in 2008 were:
- Consumers, rather than the market players, were the long-term winners. Amongst the market players, returns to the incumbents’ shareholders were better than the new market entrants.
- Next generation access (that is, high-speed fibre based last mile connectivity to the home or business) would be the defining issue for the telecoms industry globally. Regulators however did not know how to approach the issue.
- The tension between the pipes and the poetry (telecoms infrastructure v content and services provided over that infrastructure) was starting to surface – and in particular how the costs of network upgrades would be financed. Net neutrality had not at that stage really crossed the Atlantic, but the industry could see the way the winds were blowing.
- Spectrum availability, in particular as an enabler of ubiquitous ‘current speed’ broadband, was identified as a critical factor issue to resolve, even before the iPhone and iPad.
Looking back, those themes still as relevant today as they were in 2008, so I will return to them in future posts.
Finally, the star trek reference of the title has got nothing to do with trying to spoof search engines, but in the real world it does strike me that we need less ‘next-generation’ ideas and more plain English action plans to actually make things happen.