Right at the start of this year’s TMF Management World show in Nice, Keith Willetts of the TMF and Simon Torrance of Telco 2.0 joined together on stage to give the telcos a push in the direction of treating over-the-top service providers as customers instead of competitors. Fundamentally, a sound idea; think how many wars could have been avoided if the participants had only looked for a financial opportunity instead of shooting at each other. There really is an opportunity here. Telcos carry bits – for money. OTT service providers offer services that generate bits so telcos can sell bigger pipes. So far, so good.

This is the latest version of the Telco 2.0 “two-sided” business model – telcos serving regular customers on one side, and serving over-the-top service providers on the other. But there’s more to this than simply carrying bits. Keith and Simon suggested that Telcos are well placed to offer not just bit transport, but also to provide enabling services such as identity and authentication, security, billing, and quality of service management.

This is a not-too-subtle change from TMF keynotes in previous years. Not too long ago, certain industry leaders were complaining about over-the-top service providers getting a “free ride,” so it was the job of carriers to find some way of taxing them for the privilege of having their bits delivered. Carriers were being told that they had to become content providers or become extinct, because carrying bits would just be a commodity service, and the enemy, the OTT service providers, would capture all the profitable revenues. The emphasis was on carriers becoming active participants in the world of content to counter those over-the-top upstarts. “Reaching up into the content layer” was how Keith described it.

Now with very little fanfare, we have an attitude change. Keith Willetts is very good at gently introducing new ideas to industry leaders and picking up the vibes of

This is all to be welcomed. Looking for practical revenue opportunities makes more sense than trying to resist OTT growth by making life difficult for them. Collaboration will result in more win-win deals than antagonism. Ultimately, the core business of bit-carriers – carrying bits for money – will be enhanced by working in concert with those companies that create the new ideas for content and applications that encourage people to buy more bandwidth for network access. Imagine a world without search, on-line vendors, download sites, social networking and messaging: how many internet access lines would the bit carriers be able to sell?

However… (There has to be a however) these additional services may not be much of a gold mine. If the attitude change had been around three or four years ago, carriers would have been filling a big gap in the market and