My last blog The telecom event horizon attracted a lot of interest and comment. Whilst it was not my intention, the reader might have been left with a feeling of inevitable telecom doom; no apparent way to change things and a fatalism about the inevitable result. Nothing can be changed! However, there was an underlying positive message in the blog. Telecom operators have all the piece parts to deliver service and value to others. Future services will still need to be assured, designed, implemented, charged, optimised, installed (the list goes on) and at the low level functional level these services already exist and will continue to largely work as they already do. Similarly telecom operators have a WAN advantage with distinct and unique capabilities in the management of distributed and mobile networks that others will struggle to replicate. The challenge for telecom operators is that all of these advantages are currently bound up in a linear and static customer business relationship, backed by a heavily manual and siloed operational model. This model is at odds with the business and operational models of large web scale competitors and innovative software application developers. With this existing business and operational model being attached to new technical capabilities (virtualised network, IoT and 5G) the danger is that nothing changes for customers. Customers still gravitate […]