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By Joseph
J. Kestel and
Craig M. Clausen
As an industry,
telecommunications is vastly different
today than it was just a few short
years ago, let alone when compared
to before the ’96 Telecom
Act. New providers have come and
gone, old carriers have gone and
(sort of) resurrected themselves,
and new technologies—notably
of the wireless and high-speed varieties—have
changed how most of us get our information
and communicate with each other.
And the industry continues to evolve,
creating a shifting landscape for
customers and providers alike.
In this article
we examine five crucial dimensions
defining the emerging competitive
fronts of the telecommunications
marketplace war. Each dimension
also illustrates how the market
is evolving and will help focus
service providers’ attention
on the most relevant competitive
dimensions. These dimensions and
their primary “characteristics”
are identified in Table 1 below.
The first three
constitute telecom’s “quantitative
dimensions:” Connectivity
(how
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In this article we examine five
crucial dimensions defining the
emerging competitive fronts of the
telecommunications marketplace war. |
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wide), Bandwidth (how fast), and
Geography (how broad). These are marketplace
dimensions that are generally known
and easily measured, permitting an
“apples-to-apples” comparison
of services by customers. The remaining
two—Customization and Security—are
qualitative dimensions. These marketplace
dimensions, in contrast, are more
subtle and less easily measured, obscuring comparison of competitive offerings.
Service providers are competing
along each of thesedimensions,
and customers in both the business
and residential markets should
anticipate how they can capitalize—and
select their provider(s)—on
improvements in each dimension.
Dimension 1: Connectivity
The first dimension, the one
providing a major impetus for
change across all sectors of
telecommunications, is connectivity,
by which we mean “access”
in all its forms.1 There has been exponential upward
movement along this dimension—thanks
first to the proliferation of
communications via wireless
handset 2, then by the development
of Wi-Fi hotspots and, more recently, public WiFi
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“broadband everywhere” more than mere rhetoric.
Connectivity also connotes general participation in the “wired world,” as well as the concurrent rise in an “always-on(line)” lifestyle. At least two of every three Americans access the Internet from home, and a growing majority of those subscriptions are broadband connections. Among younger users—the so-called “Echo Boomers” and the “Internet Generation”—non-stop connectivity via SMS, instant messaging, and MySpace pages is practically assumed. Likewise, the introduction of Research in Motion’s BlackBerry device and “push email” technology plugged business users into their inboxes on a 24/7 basis, leading to countless stories of users addicted to email and an unending flow of information. More recent advances in handsets and wireless networks have at least one prominent player promoting “one web”—the ability to view a website anywhere, whether via wired or wireless connection.
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