The Rough Road From Telco To Connection Provider
from the and-so-it-goes... dept
Any telco that didn’t see this coming clearly deserves to be in the trouble it’s now facing. However, it appears that the old voice cash cow is finally losing steam to mobile phone service and VoIP. This shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone, but the fact that Business Week seems to find it a big deal suggests that maybe some of these carriers haven’t been paying attention. Any telco that hasn’t realized by now that they can no longer afford to just be a “telco” is in trouble. The business to be in these days is to be the “connection provider,” whether that’s as a wired or wireless broadband provider (and, probably, both). While the article frets about all of these companies losing their voice revenue, it’s a fact of life. Smart companies will move on and realize that there are much bigger opportunities in providing a big connection where voice is just one application of many — and that those applications won’t all be provided by the carrier.
