The second wave - Or, you thought All-IP was the end game, huh?

The term "telecom wars" is frequently used to describe the cutthroat competitive landscape that we, as telecom service providers, live in day in and day out. The term plays with our imagination of senior officials creating grand strategies of world domination with a back drop of a situation room with headset wearing telecom engineers sitting behind rows of large computer screens (showing maps and Erlang code scrolling by) having total control of the battles fought.  

In reality this is of course not what it looks like, at all. My take on it is slightly less dramatic... But for the telecom buffs out there this might still be worth a thought.

Mobile Telco's (and to some extent also fixed line providers) have always been fighting wars. But not necessarily competitive wars of the kind you might think, where a few similar service providers try to lure each others customers away with cheaper price plans and/or better coverage... Instead I am thinking about the constant battle against oneself and the technology you choose to invest in and base all your offerings upon.

For the everyday consumer in 2015 a mobile phone is expected to work basically everywhere on the planet and also be able to switch networks in an instant by simply exchanging a small plastic chip. This was not always the case. In the beginning you were locked to a single provider of both cell phone and technology. Over time however a dominant design emerged and standards where erected to secure interoperability and stability. The same happened with fixed line telephony decades earlier. 

So where am I heading with all of this? And what about the second wave?

Fast forward to the early 2000's and, as a industry, just as we started to settle on the basic standards of the telecom networks (e.g. AXE, GSM etc.) we started to realize that what consumers really wanted us to deliver was all related to- or could be more efficiently delivered with IP packets instead of switching circuits, we had to once again wake up and smell the coffee. All-IP was a term created to describe the way forward for telecom companies in to the internet age. Consumers asked for fast data connections and little else. Voice and messaging would quickly become commodity on top of our data networks and we had to make a move. 

- Convergence! That's it, Convergence... (Cried the vendors)

Convergence was THE move to make. The year would be approximately 2005 and the internet was becoming mainstream for most consumers already. The thinking was that if we converge (i.e. connect) our fixed and mobile networks to act as a single (IP-) network we would achieve cost advantages and provide additional services that consumers will love us for.

We started to fill our networks with services such as IPTV, Music and hosted PBX's. Consumers got used to the services and telco's were once again in the clear!

Well, only sort of.

Yes, consumers love to watch TV and listen to music. Enterprises love to buy mobile switchboards on a subscription basis. The problem is that the technology life cycle of any major Telco is much longer than what Moore's law would like. The world outside big telecom data centers kept evolving at an exponential pace, piggybacking on high volume consumer products such as the PC and iPhones.

Consumers and Enterprises wanted to buy the services but switching costs were rapidly declining sparked by born-IP companies such as Cisco and Microsoft.  

All of a sudden a silicon valley startup, starting from a dorm room, could revolutionize the way data centers are built (first Google then Facebook). A group of friends could build communication services for hundreds of millions of users without ever buying a single piece of hardware (Instagram, Snapchat etc.). Enthusiasts could build open frameworks for web services that are free to use for anyone and that by all means are as good as expensive commercial products (i.e. Openstack etc.).      

This is also where my Second Wave comes in to play. I think that what we are witnessing is the Second Wave of telco convergence. Before we even started to put our wight behind the first...

The second wave is about the convergence of fixed, mobile and web services (not only fixed and mobile). It might sound a bit mundane to talk about web services in a time where we all consume most of our content through apps... To me however this is all the same. Apps and browser-consumed services are all web apps. Long gone are the days of lengthy HTML-hacked web pages. Instead, frameworks such as Node.js, Bootstrap, PHP have revolutionized the way you build you services. Add WebRTC, Notifications, PaaS etc. to the mix and you have modular and scalable ways to build just about any service you like (and have a large community behind you to help you out)...

(one of the slides I am most happy with, ever)

Now we need to step up our game. Web-native companies would not survive a minute without great internet connections (ask anybody who has kids how long after your internet router accidentally got shut off you hear them shout WHAT THE ...). And I truly believe that Telco's can add value to any connected device (on top of the connectivity). 

The recipe for success is simple - Create services that delight the customer at the right price point. If we can't achieve this we should not even try. On the services where we can create such a mix we should double down. Examples where we can succeed with the above: TV (yes I do actually believe so), Digital Identities/security, Cloud (yes I believe this too), High Quality voice and data everywhere...         

So, coming back to the analogy of wars... If the first wave of attack is all about the element of surprise and confusing the enemy with pointed attacks, the second wave is where you go in with the heavy artillery. The telecom industry should not think that fixed-mobile convergence was the end game, it was just the beginning.