By Ed Finegold
I hit the Yankee Group’s 4G World event in my hometown of Chicago a few weeks back. It left me thinking that our industry is out of touch with where users are driving the market. We’re still trying to convince ourselves that customers will keep paying increasing subscription and per-use rates for a superior service experience. We want to believe that top line revenue will explode if we just stop offering unlimited service packages in favor of far more complex pricing and charging scenarios. Categorically, I just don’t buy it.
You can’t swim up the falls. The market has gone to all you can eat pricing. Customers like it and expect it. Pay-per-use has its place, but it’s a value-add, not a basis for pricing that can replace unlimited plans.
Further, we can’t out-innovate the Internet. We all know Google and Apple changed the game. But with Hulu and TV.com, NBC Universal and CBS have blown cable and telco TV out of the water. There are many more similar examples out there from Skype to Justin.tv. The Internet breeds simple but sophisticated services in ways telcos and cable operators just don’t.
|
|
You can’t swim up the falls. |
|
messages coming from the BSS vendor community focus on complex, multi-service scenarios where customers will be nickel-and-dimed for doing stuff they can pretty much do online for free now. It’s just that many do sound the same, and they’re selling the same confusing, vague, and unrealistic messages.
CSP engineers love the idea of complicated, multi-service scenarios because it means they get to play with cool technologies. The telco, wireless, and cable sectors spend millions in cash and person hours debating complex specifications for things like IMS, Tru2Way,
|
|
|
|
All is not lost though. We just need to face reality: telecom is a commodity business where we move bits across pipes in high volumes. We do it well. It makes for great cash-flow. If service providers get their cost structures in line and focus on delivering the best pipes, they can win big. I believe BSS providers can help them by backing off the hype, focusing on the cost issues, and making their offerings simpler to understand and deliver.
“We All Sound the Same”
A colleague who is an officer with a major billing provider said to me the other day that it is very difficult to market BSS products these days because “we’re all saying the same things. We all sound the same.” Many of the
|
|
SCTE 130, and more just to try to get services out the door that cross network boundaries. Google, Apple, NBC, etc. – they’re already doing this stuff online without all the complex standards and specs. Most of the standards effort seems to aim at getting legacy infrastructure to do what the Internet already can. Granted, we need standards to make networks function, but it all seems like overkill in the services layer.
Whether I buy it doesn’t matter. CIOs and CFOs need to believe, but the messages don’t seem to be aligned with what’s on their radar screens. My mentor, a well known CIO and billing guru, told me the truth. He said CIOs are mostly concerned with “keeping
article page
| 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | |
|
