Last week I attended a webinar from the Yankee Group called "How Can the Telecom Industry Start Growing Again?" Sort of a provocative title which got my attention, and since I had the hour open, I attended. I'm glad I did.
Basically, their message was to be innovative, both in business model and services offered. This makes total sense. I would say common sense. I'm sure though, that some people view what Yankee had to say as very radical.
Some of you are probably aware that it's somewhat fashionable right now for the telcos to ascribe for a "Google Tax," that is, since there are over-the-top services that use the telcos broadband networks, these over-the-top services used the most should pay more, directly to the telco. The webinar was the first time I had seen some kind of analysis relating to if Google shared some kind of revenue, how much would it impact the telcos. Well, according to the webinar and Yankee's analysis, whether you are a wireline or wireless telco, not much! They didn't go into detail on their calculations and I'm sure some calculations will conclude that it indeed does make sense, but let's give Yankee the benefit of the doubt and say they know what they're doing here and the analysis is correct. Given how much ink has been spent on this topic, I was surprised!
Instead of asking Google to pay a tax though, why don't the telcos themselves move to say raise data rates of the users? If they're not getting enough money to support continued infrastructure growth, why not put a "tax" on the user of the "service" that demands new infrastructure? Simple steps have been taken by AT&T for instance with regards to mobile data plans and making them more dynamic - i.e. you go over a cap you pay more. Are they worried that if they raise the rates, that people wouldn't pay and would stop? Or they would all go to the lowest cost provider? In free agency and sports, the owners claim they're not making any money, yet they continue to dole out huge contracts to the players? So when the collective bargaining agreements come up, and the owners claim "poverty" it doesn't quite wash. This kind of flashes through my head when I hear things like a "Google tax" is required. More people are using the telcos bandwidth since the people want to get to the Internet, or get to Google, or get to the Apple iStore. The telcos are getting more money since they have more subscribers. The problem is the pricing models apparently aren't making sense from the supply and demand point of view.
Another way to be innovative in the business model, and one thing I didn't hear about in the webinar, is ad insertion. After all, the greatest free content, the TV, at one time exclusively lived off advertising and now with cable networks, partially lives off advertising and partially off of users' monthly fees. So how about for data users, do the business models evolve to include advertisements? We'd be innovating the business model as per the Yankee webinar, and we'd be moving to business models that made sense.
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