Livewire: The Communications, Media and Entertainment Blog

CSPs are at the brink of a transformation – a transformation from being the ones that have been providing the strong plumbing to the ones that leverage the plumbing to change the customer experience. This is a transformation that has been necessitated by a lot of things happening simultaneously:

1. Convergence – Voice, Data, Video and Mobile coming together and calling for the quad play offering

2. Evolution of standards like Web 2.0 that have changed the way the internet is viewed

3. The change in hand sets in form and feature increasing the possibilities of what the handset can be used for

4. Lifestyle changes accompanied by change in the demographic of users of communication services

Of all these the last one – Lifestyle changes and the expectations coming out of it is the most compelling reason for the CSPs to take this transformation seriously. Users are no longer looking only for the dial tone when they think of a service provider. Instead the expectation now is that they will be able to seamlessly connect, communicate and exchange multi-media content anytime anywhere with anybody from location aware devices.

Various businesses are rushing to full fill this need. While the traditional service providers are investing heavily in increasing the bandwidth that can reach the homes, the cable providers are offering telephony for free on cable, content providers and device manufacturers are staking a claim to be the first port of call for the customers. Meeting the customer expectation and providing a rich user experience needs the infrastructure that the service providers are building. However unless the service providers transform themselves into being the ones that provide the customer experience they will be relegated to being the infrastructure providers.