At the ISP and CLEC show I just spoke at, there was a lot of talk about cloud services and desktop as a service. It would appear that a good chunk of ISP business in the US is residential. Selling to residential is different than to business. Business bundling is easier. Residential bundling - at this point in time - needs to be broken down and re-thought.

Frontier with SMS on landlines and a Tivo that records streaming TV is a way to capture the triple play bundle. AT&T is bundling Amazon Prime and HBO (as a TV replacement). At least, this recognizes the shift from a cable TV package that the telcos have been emulating since they crossed into TV to the way people are consuming TV shows now. However, it isn't that much different that what we have now -- tv, broadband, phone. Maybe we are stuck in that model.

The Quad Play of tv-Internet-phone-and -cellular either never took off or was sold wrong. (I don't see that Quad play in B2B either where there are quite a few CLECs with an MVNO deal.) The new Quad Play is with home security and automation.

B2B bundling options are more open. You can bundle voice, Internet, UC, Office365, backup, and a whole host of AAS services - SaaS, DaaS/VDI, IaaS, PaaS, and so many other AASes. You can go up the OSI stack from glass to app (fiber to the home to Office365). It is more challenging on the residential front. Not impossible, just right now that hasn't been undone yet.

So much talk about cloud and desktop as a service (nGenx was a sponsor) at the show, but that doesn't translate to the residential bundle well. There is something profound there but I just haven't had the light bulb go off yet.