Keith Willetts, Founder, TeleManagement Forum

The TeleManagement Forum has been constructing network management frameworks and building roadmaps since it was founded in 1988 as the OSI/Network Management Forum. As founder, Keith Willetts has been along for the whole ride, steering the ship through the Telecom Act of 1996 and the ups and downs that ensued. He co-authored a book called "The Lean Communications Provider" with Elizabeth Adams, then president and CEO of the forum. He has the TMF's members working feverishly to define the telecom operators' role in the communications network of tomorrow--and tomorrow, Willetts said, is closer than we think. He spoke with Telephony's Tim McElligott about the upcoming TeleManagement World event in Dallas and what the forum is doing in the face of change.

What has you excited about telecom these days?

It's fascinating how rapidly all this convergence is happening. Anything that fits into a telecom, media or Web convergence model, people are getting their hands on, putting into a bucket and stirring them up, hoping something will come out of the mixture, sometimes with no idea what the end game is.

It's almost impossible to predict who will come out on top or who will be where in the value chain. We're all still trying to figure out how the world looks a few years from now. But one thing is for sure: The telecom industry as we know it doesn't exist in a few years time.

There are so many big content and application players around the world. Local conditions may twist things a little bit, but I am not convinced that the brand names of the future will be of the telcos we know today. I think it is much more likely that retailers and innovative service providers become the dominant supply brands. But I am also convinced that the eBays and Googles of the world aren't going to put fiber in the ground.

What's a telecom service provider to do?

One of the more interesting ideas I have seen is at BT with a project called Web21C. The concept is turning themselves from a wholesale bit-pipe provider to a wholesale application and content platform provider, where they provide components to transport obviously, but also for authentication, billing, digital rights management--whatever is needed so that if two guys in a garage somewhere wanted to start the next YouTube, all they'd need would be these components exposed and they could create their applications on top of them and pay the provider for the privilege. This seems to be a way today's phone companies could use the fact that they know how to do scale and reliability and infrastructure and also get around the problem of all this value that's flying over their broadband networks but getting none of it.

Have you made a strategic decision as to how you will address the issue of convergence?

Absolutely. We are still formulating what that means, but we know networks are getting simpler and simpler and the software infrastructure required to create and deliver and charge for services and assure them is getting vastly more complicated. Our job is to worry about end-to-end service delivery. As services get richer, we have to change to accommodate that and be relevant in that world. So we have to reach out to the Time Warners from a content perspective, and the Googles and eBays from an application and services perspective, and develop some rallying points to solve our problems.

We don't know what the shape of all that is, so we don't intend to go walking away from our telecom heartland. But what will be the telecom heartland five years from now? That's the question.

What will you be talking about in Dallas along these lines?

We need to work on the service delivery platform and really try to nail down what it is. That isn't as easy as you might think. Every operator has a different picture of what they mean by SDP. So our goal is to get our arms around what the heck it is and where we think it will exist in the vale chain.

There's a lot we can get out of this melding of telecom and media cultures. There is a lot of validity in the way telecom has gone about managing its infrastructure that is very relevant to a content and application world, so I don't expect we'll have to start from scratch by any means; we will have to add to what we have. Take something as simple as the eTOM. A lot of people in the content and application world say nothing exists like this for them.

There is a lot of the "We don't know what we don't know" kind of thing around this new converged world, but the telecom industry has got a lot to teach. It also has a lot to learn about how to move quickly and not put everything together with battleship-type engineering.

Our new Telecom Media Convergence group has been doing some interesting work in this area stuff and other work has been done on video quality assurance for IPTV. Another team is getting momentum on the service delivery framework. We will be locking most of the big players in a room to determine a common industry view of an SDP. It's outside the scope of what TMF has done before because there has always been an industry body we could look to like the 3GPP, but there is no industry body defining the SDP.

How do you keep these budding relationships from getting contentious?

Well, we've had times in the TMF when every operator on the planet thought they were competitors with each other. Then it settled down when they realized they could collaborate. We've had times when software suppliers were intensely competitive over certain things and in the end they too realized there were places they could collaborate. I fully expect to see that here. But there will be a lot of jockeying for position before we get there. Telecom can't play at all points of the value chain like it used to.

But it's not all a bed of roses in the media industry either. The media industry is a trillion dollar industry like telecom, and it is losing its core revenue at about the same rate as telecom. Core advertising is about a half-trillion of that revenue and is declining about 10% per annum, like the PSTN. So it isn't like telecom is in this big hole and everyone is circling around to kill it off. The only guys in ascendancy are the Web companies, but in revenue terms, they still don't make the revenue that the phone companies and media companies make. But their market caps are enormous, so they can go out and buy things like a Skype and not even worry about it. They have enormous power because of that market cap.

In the U.S., the two big carriers left have tremendous market power, but significant market power does not stop major industries from sliding beneath the waves at significant inflection points in the past. There is a real turning point happening soon, so it will be interesting to see if Tier 1 IPTV plays can really cut it. One European operator's trial service is bleeding 30% churn a month. Customers are trying it and leaving because the service is so poor. The technology and commercial challenges are greater than anything a telecom has ever tried to put together.

Are you concerned with getting sucked into the Net neutrality debate?

I have made my own views on Net neutrality known rather than speaking for the TMF. It seems to me that whenever government intervenes in anything, it goes awry. The whole debate swirls around the economics of the situation. Look at the access networks today. There isn't an economic enticement for investing in fiber because carriers would have to give all its value away to competitors. The same with 3G. All you do when you impose legislation that suits one party and ignores the economics of the situation is stop people from investing. Today, the question mark over rate of return is stopping the sort of investment in access technology that we need for the services of the future.

The socialist utopia that says, "It is my birthright to be connected to the network forever and ever for nothing" seems to ignore the economics. Ask them what the telecom network looks like and they draw you a cloud. They have no idea what's inside and don't understand the real engineering and economic issues that underlie these networks. One can't beat City Hall, and one can't beat economics.