By all accounts 2010 will mark a sea change (or several) in the telecom industry, with an accompanying shift in the competitive landscape. xchange editor Tara Seals talked to execs at AT&T, Google, Clearwire, Comcast, XO and others about where the biggest trends, opportunities and threats are going forward. Part II of a two-part series. For Part I, please click here.
On the Trends
xchange: How do the broad trends of cloud services, VoIP, the rise of over-the-top players and widespread broadband mobility impact the business and the general competitive landscape going forward?
Comcast Corp.’s Cathy Avgiris, Senior Vice President and General Manager of Voice and Wireless Services: Quality of service will still be an issue. If you can’t get good coverage in your home, then you’ll still need home phone service and we think having a facilities-based service that has the ability to converge with video and Internet services will be highly compelling and a true differentiator for us.
Google Inc.’s Richard S. Whitt, Washington Telecom and Media Counsel: Technology has led to a dramatic increase in the pace of innovation, and things aren't slowing down. The Internet is the fastest growing communications medium in history.
We're in the midst of massive shift in computing, from a desktop-centric model to a cloud computing model, where data and content lives in the network cloud and you access and use it whenever, wherever, and however you want to. We're only just starting to scratch the surface of how we use mobile devices. There are 270 million wireless subscribers in the United States today – just a decade ago, a mobile phone was a novelty. More and more people are accessing the Web from their phones.
Sprint Nextel Corp.’s Steve Elfman, President of Network Operations and Wholesale: We’re clearly seeing everyone getting into cloud services right now – players like IBM or Microsoft. The benefit is that it’s going to allow smaller companies to get into providing their own offerings because they don’t have to spend the money on the infrastructure and instead focus on the innovation and applications. I think there’s a fair amount of that coming. I welcome that as part of the overall openness happening, and you’ll see mobility be far more than the device you’re used to. Nontraditional and M2M will be much broader categories. 4G is all about nontraditional devices. And not everything has to be Swiss Army device. There will be single purpose devices for specific segments like home health care and fleet management.