Posted: 10/2000

Telecoms Lack a Winning Strategy

My youngest daughter grew up playing soccer, so I can truly say there is no experience quite like watching a youth soccer game–20 enthusiastic, energetic, but unfocused kids, all arms and legs, chasing the ball around the field.

What distinguishes this game from the one played by older, more experienced players is the total lack of, or desire for, anything resembling strategy or structure. And the kids like it better that way. Watch them. Wherever the ball goes, so do all of the kids.

This attitude works great if you are a 6-year-old looking no farther ahead than where you are going for pizza when the game is over. But in the business world, chasing the ball without any strategy for ultimately getting it in the goal can be a dangerous distraction at best and a business killer at worst.

For the past several years, many customers feel the communications industry has acted more like the Grove Elementary School Cowboys than the U.S. Women’s Olympic Gold Medal Team.

And I don’t blame them.

In May 1998, Larry Downes and Chunka Mui wrote Unleashing the Killer App: Digital Strategies for Market Dominance.

They showed us a world where communications technologies would provide a cornucopia spilling forth content-rich applications that would enhance our lives and energize our business models.

Business customers got excited that the long-promised information superhighway, complete with a commercial-quality Internet, bandwidth on demand, and true multimedia applications, was finally going to become a reality.

Communications providers fueled this excitement with glitzy advertising campaigns and inspiring taglines that promised the ability to watch every movie ever made, at any time, in any language; the opportunity to video-commute to work from the beach; even the power to change the world.

It’s now October 2000, and customers are feeling that they have a better chance of seeing the best all-around women’s soccer player Mia Hamm at the corner grocery than they do of actually having a “killer app” that lives up to its promise.

Ask them. They’ll tell you that VoIP is closer to a CB radio than a serious business application; that they’ve seen 1920s films that were better quality than most video conferencing; and don’t even get them started on bandwidth on demand.

So, what went wrong? Downes and Mui were right-on with their assessment of the power of communications. And there is no shortage of smart companies with great applications that do have the power to give businesses a competitive advantage in the digital marketplace.

I believe that in our rush to chase the ball, that is, the next cool application, we neglected to recognize that it had rolled onto a different field altogether. In the same way that soccer can’t be played on a baseball diamond, the killer application can’t emerge unless it has the proper environment in which to flourish.

I call this the “killer platform.” And I believe that this lack of a killer platform is what has left the customer feeling as unfulfilled as a group of 6-year-olds during a rainout.

The Killer Platform

Now, before you think that I am discounting the enormous strides made in the last five years in providing bandwidth and capacity to customers, let me clarify that a killer platform is comprised of much more than just static bandwidth.

A killer platform is an enabling environment for the customer and their business applications, and consists of several layers beyond mere transport. To be so enabling that it is killer, the platform must include: a service delivery infrastructure that provides for bandwidth that is “liquid;” a service and subscriber management layer that is empowering; and a content and communications services layer that is disruptive.

To be fair, one thing that has been lacking in the development of the killer platform is the technology that enables bandwidth to become truly liquid–“pourable” anywhere, anytime and in any amount. In industry terms, it means bandwidth that is infinitely scalable, instantly provisionable, incrementally billable and independent of protocol.

The current OC-x SONET architecture has been far too restrictive by forcing bandwidth to fit into predefined pipes. Customers who only needed 160mbps of throughput were forced to take an OC-12 pipe and swallow the extra capacity.

Similarly, customers have been required to take this capacity in an “always on” state. No facility existed for turning up 100mbps of bandwidth for 24 hours then turning it off after the need had passed.

To compound this inflexibility are provisioning times that are longer than most soccer seasons and protocol restrictions that force the customer to either forklift upgrade a network or run separate networks on multiple protocols.

Given this state of affairs, it’s no wonder that most customers act as if they would rather body-block a shot from forward-turned-defender Brandi Chastain than go one-on-one with their network provider.

Fortunately, the emergence of various switchable optical wavelength technologies from companies such as Ciena Corp.
(www.ciena.com), Cisco Systems Inc. (www.cisco.com), Corvis Corp.
(www.corvis.com) and Nortel Networks Corp. (www.nortel.com) finally are making it possible to overcome many of these limitations and extend liquid bandwidth to customers, freeing them from the limitations of today’s networks.

Broadwing Inc.
(www.broadwing.com) has announced that it will be the first provider to commercially deploy a fully optical network by the end of this year.
And Williams Communications (www.williamscommunications.com) and Qwest Communications International Inc.
(www.qwest.com) also have announced intentions to enter the optical space by mid- to late-2001.

Management Layer

A concern that frequently is voiced when the conversation turns to abundant bandwidth regards whether it will become a commodity. I think yes, and no, and both answers are good for the customer and the industry.

Three things are required for a service to be openly traded like a commodity: reliability, availability and fungibility. Customers who look to trade bandwidth like sugar or oil need to feel confident that they can get the bandwidth in the amounts they need, where and when they need it, and that it will be reliable and consistent regardless of source.

Paradoxically, addressing these issues for the creation of commodity bandwidth trading markets also will provide additional differentiation between providers that will appeal to companies seeking the smartest and best providers to give them a competitive advantage.

It is this service and subscriber management layer that is woefully lacking in many aspects today and will continue to be a challenge for many in the future.

Customers have been telling this industry for years that they feel the communications landscape is littered with providers whose execution doesn’t come close to living up to their expectations. Although bandwidth may be getting more abundant, provisioning can still take longer than most soccer seasons, billing is as inconsistent as an amateur pickup game, and customer accountability is as hard to find as a clean uniform on a muddy field.

It is these customer-facing operational support systems that can empower the customer and provide them with the capability to immediately track and customize applications to meet their business needs. Everything from the QoS-level guarantees to the provisioning interval, to the usefulness of web-based customer network management systems creates differentiation between providers and shines a light on those who can take a customer to new heights and those who cannot.

It is this service and subscriber management layer that is essential for a killer platform to move from internally (provider) focused to externally (customer) focused.

Disruptive Services

The final element of the killer platform is the type of disruptive services it enables. Killer applications stem from putting these services to work to radically change business models.

For example, until recently, high-capacity storage devices were confined to LANs in order to run at native speed (a requirement for transferring enormous amounts of data back and forth in a timely manner). When bandwidth constraint becomes a thing of the past, these devices can be consolidated, located anywhere, and become much more than just super-sized data warehouses.

Streaming media now becomes practical and economical. This is the missing link in the value chain between information companies and content companies. When content can be stored in tremendous amounts and is immediately accessible, the promise of a digital world complete with multimedia and rich content applications that have the killer potential to change business models becomes a reality for all, because customers can finally access it quickly and economically.

Many have been obsessed with chasing the “ball” of killer applications around the old field of play without any regard for how these applications would become real for customers.

Those who will become leaders in the evolution of our industry will create and deploy the killer platforms that free customers from the limitations of traditional networks.

Only when these killer platforms enable our customers to realize the power of the killer application can we raise the trophy of the Internet revolution above our heads.

Richard Ellenberger is president and CEO of Broadwing Inc.
(www.broadwing.com). He can be reached through the corporate communications department at +1 513 397 9212.

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ROUNDTABLE

On OSS problems competitive carriers have …”There are still OSS problems around the country. There are still issues. Throughout the country, loop provisioning is still one of the biggest. Intervals can take months. And this happens all the time.”

–Kim Kirby, vice president of state affairs, ALTS
(www.alts.org)

“ILECs don’t want to get rid of legacy OSSs–they can’t. Because it has to do with operations, there’s just too much money at stake. They can’t just rip them out and overhaul them.”

–Goutam Shaw, product manager, Bridgewater Systems Corp.
(www.bridgewatersystems.com)

“In general I think that the testing of the BOCs’ OSSs should not be left to third-party testers. We saw in New York state the problems that brings. The marketplace needs to test the systems prior to long-distance entry.”

–Don Lynch, telecom analyst, Lynch Associates
(www.lynch-associates.com)

“Yes, the OSS situation definitely has improved, but it’s not easy everywhere to do business with the ILECs. And it’s in the CLECs’ best interest to say the OSSs don’t work or else Wall Street would want to see more CLEC growth. Both are going to posture on this issue.”

–Mark
Effinger, executive director and chief OSS architect, Telcordia Technologies Inc.
(www.telcordia.com)