Are Telcos becoming dumb pipes?
On 15th Feb an announcement was made in the Mobile World Congress held in Barcelona.Two dozen of the world's largest mobile-phone companies, including Verizon Wireless, AT&T, NTT DoCoMo, Deutsche Telekom, China Mobile, Telecom Italia and Vodafone are teaming up to create an "open international applications platform," in direct response to Apple's success with its own iPhone App Store, Called the the "Wholesale Applications Community" (ref.).
On 17th, Google CEO has launched new mobile technology bits like how Google phones could already perform voice recognition and translate spoken phrases into different languages and claimed that people who don't even speak the same language will soon be able to have live conversations and Google phone cameras will translate items like foreign restaurant menus in seconds. (ref. ).
New Skype apps for the iPhone and Symbian platforms will allow mobile users to bypass telco voice networks completely, making calls using the internet over the 3G data network (ref.).
Already these facilitites have reached a common consumer like you and me who use skype for voice/vedio chat or some local provides which provide 5c/min call to UK, 3c/min to India from Australia with a great quality whereas the local national call is still 20c/min. So while enhancing the technology and making it handy (mobile), these innvotions puzzling the analysts and frightening telcos, who are unsure whether these companies are friends or "frenemies".
The telcos are being confined to only bandwidth providers turning them to dumb pipes which is causing tension to the Telcos and their monopolies, whether it is Telstra in Australia or AT&T, Verizon in USA (even after 1986 FCC resolutions in dividing the Bell company).
Another angle to this is from the innovations from traditional equipment manufacturers like Mobile - Nokia, Samsong etc. Network manufacturers - Alcatel-lucent, Nortel, Siemens etc. IP device manufacturers - Cisco, Juniper. So running a telco business with these many variety of suppliers (device, technology and services), ensuring the quality of service from to the end customers is a great challenge. These are some of the challenges in communications industry.
Similar challenges and trengs can be seen in other industries also. From all these developments (being an IT oriented person) a serious question arises in mind. Will to-day's IT applications be able to satisfy these requirements and new developments? I doubt even tomorrow's IT applications (as per the roadmaps from big IT suppliers like Oracle / SAP etc.) can fulfill these industry challenges. I would be interested in knowing your immediate thoughts on this.
