The Social Taboo Trio: Politics, Religion and Telecommunications

It is the response to this situation where the analogy between politicians and telecom operators breaks down. While politicians usually need to make a choice between serving their base or attracting new voters outside their core supporters, telecom operators have no choice but to try to satisfy both the needs of contented subscribers and those that are looking for the latest and greatest. This has put most telecom operator in the fiscally paradoxical position of overhauling their network infrastructures to deliver new services to early adopters while at the same time shielding most of their existing customers from this massive transition. In other words, carriers are spending billions of dollars to build out their networks to deliver new services and billions more to maintain at least the perception among not-so-early adopters that their plain old telephone service is as reassuringly plain as ever.

This is of course the conundrum that operators are facing. Analysts and pundits are screaming that the only thing that matters in the marketplace is customer experience: those service providers that deliver the best customer experience will win the day. The only problem, of course, is that one customer’s experience is completely different from another’s. BT continues to be the poster operator for telecom transformation. The company is spending like gangbusters to modernize its service delivery infrastructure to compete with Google and other Over The Top (OTT) players. At the same time, however, its PSTN replacement project, which is costing billions, is dedicated to pleasing 30 million POTS users by making the network optimization process as transparent as possible.

The failure of equipment makers and pundits to recognize that customer experience is about simultaneously satisfying early adopters and stodgy subscribers is the major reason for the postponement of the adoption of IMS. The IMS architecture is all about building new services and providing a user experience that has no limits in terms of customization and sophistication. That’s an obvious milestone that telecommunications operators need to strive to reach. What sense would it make, however, for operators to descend deep into debt in order to offer a services menu that only about 10% of their customer bases are ready to sample from?

Spending 90% of their infrastructure improvement budgets to appease a customer segment that represents perhaps 10% of overall revenue was something that telecom operators were never prepared to do. Accordingly, carriers are adopting IMS on a more incremental timetable, and one that better coincides with the shift in willingness among subscribers to seek out a communications experiences that goes beyond their POTS line.

Rejoining the politics/telecom analogy, neither industry is a stranger to hyperbole and misinformation and both have been known to take a statement of fact and interpret it through a partisan prism. So, when advocates of massive telecommunications overhauls and the introduction of sophisticated services offerings say that customer experience is all that matters, the responsible telecom operator needs to keep in mind its entire universe of subscribers, not just a particular segment.