The latest in TelcoForge’s Leaders’ Meeting reports shares perspectives from VP and C-Level leaders and innovators around the world on how to compete against global-scale rivals. One important answer: Better to change the rules of the game than tackle that problem head-on.
The previous report investigated how it is that telecoms operators have often struggled to do well growing into adjacent markets. The most prominent response was that a company limited to a national scale tends not to gain the economies and expertise gained by players in adjacent markets who can operate at a global scale.
So these conversations under Chatham House Rules aimed to identify effective routes for national-scale operators to compete with global-scale players.
Discussion in the 16-page report covered a wide variety of issues, from the core business questions across culture, technology, policy and even the role of energy supply as a potential future bottleneck (or not).
Because of the anonymous nature of the conversation, participants were able to be quite frank about their views. To give just a few snapshots:
“Does any telecoms company in the US think they’re going to go global and actually have a global service? Not a chance in hell. I mean, there’s just no government in all these other regions that’s going to support that.”
“Telcos often see the opportunity early, but they don’t have the staying power.”
“There is a point as we move to SDNs where we do more of our own engineering. In the western world at some point, maybe we’ll spend less time building infrastructure and more time building these API gateways. We’ll start to think about the network a little different.”
While discussion offered more insights than only the core problem, discussion examined a wide variety of concepts including:
- When global scale makes sense and the problems of it
- Delivering services effectively as if with global scale
- The possibility of escaping the problem of national constraints
- Scaling service creation, adaptation and delivery instead of scaling reach
Although there were several occasions where participants poured cold water on current or previous attempts to change, they highlighted some opportunities which would offer potential solutions, depending on the willingness of service providers and regulators to adapt.
For a copy of the full report, click here. And if you’d like your executives to be considered for the invitation list on future discussions, contact alex.lawrence@telcoforge.com.
