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There's a painful paradox emerging for next-gen comms. I don't think the telecom equipment vendors quite realise its implications yet.
Vendors say that they can offer prioritised, guaranteed QoS for specific mobile services, if Net Neutrality laws permitted it. They could optimise YouTube, Skype, whatever, right down to the packet scheduling at the base station, and provide end-to-end quality guarantees.
Let's imagine that they're right.
Let's imagine as well, that laws permit this to happen.
If that's the case, why would I, as an operator exec, bother to run my own telephony service in a core network any more? Given that voice revenues and margins are going to fall anyway, wouldn't I just use a third-party service? Maybe a hosted, multi-tenant, "cloud" or UTF version of VoLTE? Why would I want my own, when I could spend the money on something new and growing?
At the moment, telephony is a bizarre industry, with 1000 local manufacturers of a commodity product, despite it having near-zero shipping costs. Each has its own small factory, with the only difference being a special sticker with a "number" on each unit produced, issued by a local licencing authority. Each factory can do maintenance on the units produced in one of the other factories, but charges them quite a lot of money for the work.
In most similar industries these days, you get big regional manufacturers, with huge warehouses and efficient distribution networks.
The two perceived barriers to this model applying in telecoms are QoS, and regulation (which is usually consumer-centric).
If vendors and operators *really* enable QoS for third-party services, they make the "local voice manufacturer" model look even more archaic.
As regulation catches up, we will inevitably move to more centralised production of "commodity VoIP", and the local players will have to revert to being "cottage industries" producing specialised "craft voice" services.
I don't think that vendors have quite woken up to the dilemma that the more QoS equipment they sell, the less standalone telephony and comms services infrastructure is needed.
*Sign up for this blog's email list* *Attend #TelcoOTT / Future of Voice workshops*
There's a painful paradox emerging for next-gen comms. I don't think the telecom equipment vendors quite realise its implications yet.
Vendors say that they can offer prioritised, guaranteed QoS for specific mobile services, if Net Neutrality laws permitted it. They could optimise YouTube, Skype, whatever, right down to the packet scheduling at the base station, and provide end-to-end quality guarantees.
Let's imagine that they're right.
Let's imagine as well, that laws permit this to happen.
If that's the case, why would I, as an operator exec, bother to run my own telephony service in a core network any more? Given that voice revenues and margins are going to fall anyway, wouldn't I just use a third-party service? Maybe a hosted, multi-tenant, "cloud" or UTF version of VoLTE? Why would I want my own, when I could spend the money on something new and growing?
At the moment, telephony is a bizarre industry, with 1000 local manufacturers of a commodity product, despite it having near-zero shipping costs. Each has its own small factory, with the only difference being a special sticker with a "number" on each unit produced, issued by a local licencing authority. Each factory can do maintenance on the units produced in one of the other factories, but charges them quite a lot of money for the work.
In most similar industries these days, you get big regional manufacturers, with huge warehouses and efficient distribution networks.
The two perceived barriers to this model applying in telecoms are QoS, and regulation (which is usually consumer-centric).
If vendors and operators *really* enable QoS for third-party services, they make the "local voice manufacturer" model look even more archaic.
As regulation catches up, we will inevitably move to more centralised production of "commodity VoIP", and the local players will have to revert to being "cottage industries" producing specialised "craft voice" services.
I don't think that vendors have quite woken up to the dilemma that the more QoS equipment they sell, the less standalone telephony and comms services infrastructure is needed.
*Sign up for this blog's email list* *Attend #TelcoOTT / Future of Voice workshops*
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