The Social Taboo Trio: Politics, Religion and Telecommunications

I’ve being around long enough to know that there’s no faster way to make enemies – or turn off readers – than to start talking politics. It seems that just about everyone now falls on one extreme or the other of the political spectrum. No matter how well informed or thoughtful you think your opinions, to at least half of your audience, they are just plain wrong – and often infuriating.

Nowadays, however, it’s really hard to separate telecommunications from politics. Not only is the telecom industry the biggest lobbyist faction in Washington D.C., one of the most contentious pieces of legislation to come out of Congress in recent years was in large part about whether the former Ma Bell could be held accountable for playing Big Brother.

For me, though, the most striking synergies between U.S. politics and telecommunications are wrapped around the coming election. Just as the presumptive candidates of each party are honing strategies that will attract the most votes in November, telecom operators are looking to beat out their competitors by retaining as many existing subscribers, while at the same time attracting new ones. In the political world, this process is known as expanding one’s base. The tricky part about pulling this off, of course, is that you don’t want to attract new voters (subscribers) at the expense of existing ones.

Every four years the American electorate gets to watch political aspirants for the highest office in the world play this delicate game of balance. Whether you call it moving to the middle or something else, presidential politicians struggle – sometimes in public – with a choice between solidifying their core collection of supporters or widening their ideological stances to try to appeal to voters closer to the middle. The risk, of course, is that they can stray so far from their base that they risk alienating the voters who were believed to be sure things. Taking supporters for granted has been the downfall of many political aspirants.

Telecom operators are facing a similar situation as we move into the second half of this election year. Operators are under tremendous pressure to retain and attract new subscribers through the introduction of new, personalized services. Updating service delivery infrastructures to facilitate this transformation, however, is no trivial task. Telecom operators are faced with significant and costly overhauls of their networks and business models in order win over these new constituents. Just like their political analogs, though, telecom operators cannot ignore their core subscribers, even if that universe is steadily shrinking. Nobody knows the exact percentage, but it’s safe to say that a majority of subscribers to telecom services are most concerned about their phones working the same way they always have – and perhaps at a less expensive rate. A clear minority, on the other hand, are so-called early adopters and likely to flock to a telecommunications service provider based on the availability of cutting-edge services.