And so it goes with social networking. Lured like lemmings to the cliff edge we all embraced Facebook in its simplest form as a great way to communicate with friends and family, keep up to date with our circle of friends and even extend that circle to our friend’s circles, and so on. What a romantic notion that something that would radically change our lives and take up so much of our spare time would always be free.

Whilst Mr Zuckerberg may have started with the same altruistic notion, the moment his ‘baby’ grew up and had to morph into a public corporation with all the pressures of sustainability, making money and distributing profits to shareholders, the whole game changed. The objective now is to use every possible opportunity to confront all those freeloading ‘faces’ with advertisements, offers and add-ons that have to paid for in order to fill the Facebook coffers.

To be fair, this is not a dilemma unique to Facebook. Almost every other ‘free’ online social scene-setter aims to get numbers up first by being free, then attracting investment against those numbers to allow even more expansion. Once it achieves enough momentum, and a viable number of subscribers, the founders and early investors push for an IPO or exit by sale and the whole thing emerges, hopefully, as a moneymaker.

However, unlike the successful case studies taught in business school, not all can make the transition successfully, and like their ‘dotcom bust’ predecessors, many will disappear without a trace. Tumblr, the six-year-old blog network that months ago began letting advertisers pay for prominent placement, expects to make its first annual profit this year after extending the feature to smartphones. Tumblr even tells advertisers to come up with campaigns that will spread through the network like its other content.

Teenagers are a good measure of what’s “cool.” Observing which apps they use and how they interact with technology can help the rest of us spot budding trends and lately it seems teens have grown tired of Facebook. MSN says that recent trend reports indicate that teens and tweens are now ‘kinda bored’ with Mark Zuckerberg’s social network, flocking instead to fresher services like the photo-sharing and filtering service Instagram and Snapchat.

Part of the appeal is that parents are less clued-in to these newer tools, so they can be enjoyed more furtively. Facebook actually warned investors of its declining cool factor recently, noting, “Some of our users have reduced their engagement with Facebook in favor of increased engagement with other products and services such as Instagram.” But before you start seeing the writing on the wall for Zuckerberg, don’t forget: Facebook owns Instagram, too.

Not long ago, many Instagram users were locked out of their accounts with a demand that they produce some government-issued documentation to prove their identity. Many on the forum said they thought the notice was a phishing ploy to get personal information. This comes after Facebook had infuriated users ofInstagram by changing its terms of service to allow it to sell peoples’ uploaded photos or related data. The change led to an outpouring of anger online — although the move echoes similar moves made by other services, such as Twitpic in 2011, which are allied to fast-moving micro-blogging services such as Twitter. Even Twitter is looking at becoming more commercial with ad placements.

But getting back to the point, if things take their natural course we may soon see sites like Facebook, Twitter and Instagram offering an ad-free option – presuming you are willing to pay NOT to be annoyed!

First published as The Insider at TM Forum

It really was no fun cramming onto buses and trains to get to the venue. Taxis were plentiful but restricted in movement because of poor management and traffic control in and around the venue. The distances people had to walk each day would qualify them for an Olympic event. There was barely any under-cover seating, but plenty of outdoor garden space that was only usable when temperatures reached 10 degrees centigrade or it wasn’t raining. Some even resorted to using toilets as temporary work seats! And the food, even with 54 outlets, was passable at best.

The new venue can only be described as an island smack in the middle of an industrial sea. It is large (very large), yet functional, has no cobblestones (a blessing), provides undercover walkways along its 1.2 kilometre span and despite having 72,000 people tramping over its nine massive halls, it coped really well. Barcelona itself is probably one of the few cities in Europe that can survive such a massive influx of people all needing accommodation, restaurants and bars to melt into after a hard day in the congress. Not to mention the endless round of parties, dinners and special functions put on to woo customers and press. No wonder people leave exhausted each year.

Yet all of this combined means that in one place for four days each year you can see, meet and hear almost every key player in the GSM mobile world. And there lies its secret. The glitz, the ritzy exhibits, the partially clad promo girls, the gimmicks, the giveaways are all inconsequential when you get down to the business of doing business. No longer do people turn up at events like MWC just to attend the conference sessions, walk the stands or attend the parties, they all come here to network in person and do business.

For suppliers, all their customers and prospects are in one place for one week. No need to send sales teams around the globe to meet with them, they come to you. And not just the managers and directors, there are more telco C-levels in Barcelona for MWC than are left behind in the office. For suppliers and operators alike, if you are not seen at MWC you are either out of business or out of a job.

Forget virtual social networking, this is good old-fashioned, physical networking at its best. Most meetings are arranged ahead of time and stands are changing slowly from gaudy temples pulling in passer-bys to sophisticated business environments complete with comfortable meeting rooms, lounges, bars, espresso machines and delicacies including Swiss chocolates, Portuguese egg tarts, French pastries and wines from every corner of the globe. Ericsson even recreated a village market square complete with food vendors on tricycles and roads taking prospects on ‘journeys’ into customer experience and network performance.

All of that aside, the most pleasing aspect of this year’s MWC was the appearance of so many digital service players. Carmaker, Ford, had a massive presence showing off its connected car solutions. There were e-Health players, smart grid and utility suppliers, m-Payment providers and the event itself was NFC-enabled. Hall 8 was packed with the most amazing application developments and mobile marketing purveyors. It was not quite moving the mountain but it was great to see the digital and telecom worlds really getting together after years of playing around.

Above all, the indications are that despite our worst fears of declining revenues and margin erosion there was a real appetite, not just for the delicacies mentioned above, but for venturing into new business opportunities with new partners. There is no doubt the digital economy is ramping up, and it looks like the telcos may actually be along for the ride.

First posted as The Insider at TM Forum

There is some merit to the argument when you consider that regulation stemmed from the old PSTN days when telecommunications was a national security asset operated by a government-owned monopoly. Regulation was established mainly to protect it. But when markets were eventually allowed to open up and ‘deregulation’ did take place, the regulator’s tack changed to protect the new players from unfair competition emanating from the monopolies they were trying to establish a beachhead against.

Now that most markets have multiple established fixed line, ISP and mobile operators competing on more even ground, the need for anti-competitive regulation and even universal service fund obligations are probably no longer viable or required. This alone should have been a fair enough argument by the operators, but they took it one step further in Barcelona.

Franco Bernabè, CEO of Telecom Italia complained that regulation and taxation in the industry harked back to days of high margins from a decade back, saying that the mobile industry was burdened by a ‘dated’ regime while struggling to compete. Vittorio Colao, CEO of Vodafone, said that the telecoms groups would talk to the European regulator in Barcelona and that he favored an approach that factors in pan-European scale, rather than one based on a single country. He also backed proposals for a single European regulator to help this happen and, when you take into account the inconsistencies across Europe, that argument makes eminent sense.

Surprise, surprise even AT&T’s CEO, Randall Stephenson, said he was “in violent agreement’ with his European counterparts, and that alone has to be a first! The conspiracy theorists are, no doubt, thinking all the CEO comments are a pre-meditated attack on the regulators, but the fact remains that all of them really do believe that it’s time to change the playing field.

CSPs are no longer competing just with each other; they are fighting a new battle for revenue from everyone that uses their network resources, not just their customers. This is the real world. They might believe that everyone that uses the digital highway should pay the toll, but that is simply not viable, at least for now. The big traffic comes from the OTT players like YouTube and Netflix, and the guys appearing to be making the most money are Google and, to lesser but growing extent, Facebook.

Turk Telekom Group CEO, Hakam Kanafani, held back no punches when he suggested on the TM Forum’s Business Transformation Panel that the very same regulation that CSPs had to abide by should be extended to everyone that used their networks, i.e. the OTT players. He felt clearly disadvantaged that his company was regulated, yet those using his network were free to do whatever they liked, especially with regard to capturing personal information. Is that a fair point?

The digital services players, however, are not only not hindered by regulation, they are also not hindered by all those legacy systems that burden CSPs. They live in an all-IP world. What do they care for the differences between copper, fiber, 2G, 3G and 4G mobile networks. They have less business processes to worry about, less delivery platforms and very simple subscriber and unit pricing models when delivering content or apps. They give voice away simply because the cost of billing it exceeds the margins earned and most only sell to customers that have bought pre-paid cards in shops or have credit/debit cards.

They don’t have extensive customer care operations, in many cases none. They run lean and mean – so should they be penalized for their efficiency just because their CSO counterparts are stuck suffering because everything they implement has to ‘backward compatible’?

Come on CEOs, stop griping and start fighting back. Maybe it’s time to dump the legacy and meet the challenge of the new competition on an even footing or, better still, start acting like OTT players yourselves.

First published at TM Forum as The Insider

Don’t get me wrong, they are both serious issues, but the latter should have Facebook users that choose to login to other sites using their Facebook credentials shaking in their shoes. How many sites now allow you to login using Facebook, your Microsoft account and others? Why anyone would opt for Facebook login for anything but Facebook defies logic. The whole idea of having different logins is to protect oneself from hacking in one vulnerable site that could expose the user’s personal accounts on other sites.

Twitter accounts for Burger King and Jeep were also compromised this week. As AdAge digital points out, “Twitter began as a platform for people to send short, mass messages, and as brands began to uncover its usefulness, they, too, jumped in. Today Twitter essentially treats as equals – brands with millions of followers and people with only a handful – offering one standard account type to serve both.” But the breaches certainly point to the need for a distinction.

Twitter declined to comment on the hacks, citing the privacy of individual accounts. But Gizmodo has made a speculative ID of the hacker based on the content of his tweets and posts that the Burger King account was breached by resetting a password via a compromised email account. Great, that might help find the culprit but there will be another tomorrow and the day after. Damn the excuses, the accounts were hacked and if Twitter wants to raise its status and remain viable it simply cannot allow these things to happen.

So many internet sites and social networks only require single factor authentication when most banks now require at least two. Speed and simplicity, however desirable, may prove to be a liability for many, but carrying around bags of security tokens is not be a viable alternative either.

It raises questions of whether identity and security should be inextricably linked but that also raises the question of who or what will be trustworthy enough to be act as the secure handler of those security details, and what if they are compromised. Governments, CSPs and banks have all been mooted as potential trusted partners, and even though they sound like far more secure options than Facebook as identity brokers, they too are a risk.

Consumers are advised to have a different login and password for all access to secure sites so that if any one site is compromised their information can’t be randomly used on other sites to gain access. But if you have logins to hundreds of sites, how can you possibly remember them all, especially if they have been created by those clever password generators?

Oh yes, there are those password storage applications that have proliferated on mobile platforms that store encrypted information in the cloud so it can be accessed by all your devices. They are brilliant in concept, design and operation but who are they created by, where is the data stored and who manages the encryption. I’m not saying that any of them cannot be trusted but if you plan to keep all your confidential information in a safe place you should probably check just how safe it is. If you can, that is!

So, what’s the solution? Stopping all access to any site via the internet is a start, but is no guarantee. Reverting to cash, writing cheques and quitting all web-based portals that hold any of your information might work, but is it really an option, e.g. you or your house could get robbed or your date may not be deleted. Having multiple virtual identities, if you can remember them is another.  As more and more ‘free’ social sites revert to any means of ‘monetization’ the options of being safe and secure are reduced. we are in danger fo killing of the digital age before we even get into it.

So, what’s left?

First published at TM Forum as The Insider

That may not seem such a bad idea but in such a fiercely competitive market, content has been a highly prized, lucrative and crucial differentiator – up until now, that is. Back in the days of iMode, for those that can remember, content providers were being wooed with up to 90 per cent plus revenue share models by operators, unheard of in other countries.

The form factor of the very popular ‘clam-shell’ phones, the early high-definition screens and the use of space saving Kanji characters all contributed to a comfortable content delivery and consumption model that really did not catch on elsewhere until the era of smartphones and high speed networks. Japan was truly the country where content was ‘king’ and walled-gardens never questioned.

So, why the sudden change of heart? It seems that NTT DoCoMo, KDDI and Softbank have always been battling to increase the number of their subscribers in a market that is tantamount to saturated. At the same time, revenue growth from communication charges have stagnated and the days of price wars are well behind them. As a result, they are all turning to content services to bolster sales, but not just with their own customers, as has been the tradition.

Now that smartphones have taken hold, 30 million units shipped in the last twelve months, and customers are free to purchase online content and apps for any number of OTT players it makes sense for the mobile operators to open up, hoping to sell their wares to their competitors customers as well. It doesn’t seem to be a collusive effort, more an opening up of those old closed shops. There is also no sign that they will join forces to form another ill-fated WAC-type platform. Each continues to maintain its own shop fronts but with the doors wide open for all to visit.

For example, DoCoMo has been offering its “dgame” mobile gaming service to smartphone and tablet users irrespective of their providers. The company is considering expanding its content services for smartphones and tablet devices to include video streaming and online shopping, with an eye toward generating one trillion yen ($10.77 billion) in sales through new business. KDDI and Softbank are doing the same with their music and video streaming services to both iOS and Android customers of any provider.

Is it possible we may some day see operator billing opened up so that customers could be charged by their own provider when they buy goods and services from another? It sounds bizarre but not so far-fetched when we see efforts being made to provide the same service to OTT content providers.

Ultimately, a telco ecosystem of sorts might evolve where the dominant provider in a particular area, e.g. games or apps, might become the specialist and the others point their business in that direction with some sort of margin or revenue share arrangement in place, yet keeping the all important billing component in-house, of course. And would a model like this catch on outside of Japan? I, for one, would like to see it tried. Any takers?

First published at TM Forum as The Insider

Oh yes, there’s Bing, but that belongs to the other archrival, Microsoft. After the debacle with replacing Google Maps on iOS with its own homegrown not-so-great Maps application, it is highly unlikely that Apple would tempt fate a second time. Anyway, they don’t have their own search engine – yet.

So why is Google paying Apple when it is pretty clear that there is very little other choice for Apple? According to a report titled ‘The Next Google is Google’ by Morgan Stanley analyst, Scott Devitt, Google’s mobile business depends heavily on iOS devices. In fact, a whopping 80 per cent of mobile advertising revenues come from Apple mobile devices. That figure alone blows the iOS/Android general market share figures out of the water. There may be more Android devices out there, but their owners are obviously not as ad-happy as their Apple counterparts.

By the way, those traffic figures became public only because of the patent and copyright infringement battle between Oracle and Google and comments made by Google CEO, Larry Page. Another interesting revelation from Devitt is that he believes the payment is based on a very simple fee per device and not a revenue sharing deal as generally believed.

That makes a lot of sense as Google would be reticent to share its ad revenues with anyone, let alone opening them up to a ‘competitor.’ Apple, on the other hand, seems only too happy to release its iOS device sales figures. Google pays once, up front, but gets a lifetime customer using Google by default. Apple also has a hedge against users going to Google.com and searching from there instead of the default search box on iOS.

Google is already known to pay Mozilla $300 million in order to keep Google search the default option on Firefox. Devitt estimates Google controls 95 per cent of the mobile search market dominated by Apple and Android and that “paying ~$1 billion a year for a monopoly on the most lucrative online business in the world is a no-brainer.” Who could argue?

This is one example of how rivals can actually benefit from each other in today’s digital eco-system. It also helps explain why CSPs like Free in France are questioning why they are not sharing in some of Google’s lucrative revenue stream, considering they provide the means of connection for many of those mobile devices. Take away that brilliant connectivity and no amount of search box monopolization will be of any value. Fair point, but not one that will scare Google anytime soon.

Apple is one big player owning a big slab of the mobile device market. CSPs are a disparate lot of relatively small operations (in comparison to Google and Apple) and could only carry the necessary gravitas to move Google if they were a monopoly themselves in a market that Google desperately needed. Even then, Google could probably buy them out with one day’s revenues. It seems CSPs are going to have become much creative if they are to extricate money from Google.

First published at TM Forum as The Insider

TM Forum members present at Management World in Dublin in 2011 and Singapore in 2012 will not be surprised at this news because it was an idea openly presented by board member, Michael Lawrey, who is also executive director at Telstra.

At the time, Lawrey’s comments were picked up by a number of publications, with a variety of interpretations. Light Reading quoted him saying “that (this) will allow us to differentiate on traffic, and to be able to manage differentiated services as close to actual customer as possible.” RCR Wireless News quoted Lawrey as saying that Telstra would soon take action against customers thought to be abusing the carrier’s fair use policies. IT News Australia said that “Lawrey made waves ….. when plans emerged to throttle or cut off ‘downloaders of illegal content,’ whom he reportedly blamed for network congestion.”

The Insider made note of one particular statement that made eminent sense. When referring to those exploiting the Telstra networks for illegal downloading of content and P2P activities Lawrey said,” “I’d love for them to go to the regulators” to complain.

The concept of ‘throttling’ P2P traffic has been around for a long time and Telstra is certainly not the only one looking at it as a means of controlling over-usage and abuse by a small number of users. Even though P2P networks are commonly used to download pirated material such as movies, music and video games this is not always the primary reason for controlling them.

At the time there were concerns that illegal and copyright infringement traffic over a CSP or ISP’s network could see them prosecuted. A landmark case by Hollywood studios against one ISP along these grounds was subsequently lost. Nevertheless, there is no doubt that content owners still hold some sway and may be continuing to put pressure on operators to curb illegal traffic to preserve both their revenue streams from legitimate content sales.

In a post on the Telstra News website, it was stated that “online piracy is an important policy issue and Telstra remains open to discussions with a range of stakeholders to identify workable solutions that protect the interests and privacy of our customers. However, this trial is solely about examining ways of improving our network management to ensure that all of our customers enjoy the best quality service for their specific needs at the best possible price.

As part of this project, Telstra is trialling network enhancements that allow the identification of specific types of traffic on our network. The technology being used looks at characteristics of the data packet to identify the type of the traffic present. Any inspection that takes place is used only to identify the signature of the traffic; it does not identify the content (e.g. whether this is a movie, the title or any other details).”

This was followed by the all-important disclaimer that, “This trial does not involve any monitoring or tracking of the sites visited by our customers, and the trial’s findings, including customer feedback, will be collected in accordance with our Privacy Statement.”

Of course, not all P2P traffic is of a dubious nature and critics were quick to jump in and criticize Telstra’s move. It won’t be long before the ‘net neutrality’ proponents also jump in with their two cents worth. However, the fact remains that network operators are having to manage their resources as fairly and evenly as possible to provide good service to ALL their customers. If this is threatened by a minority of abusers then any form of control or traffic shaping is surely their prerogative. No doubt, others will be watching and applauding from the sidelines as Telstra sets a precedent.

First published at TM Forum as The Insider

In the last two weeks, The Insider has been exposed to presentations by big name internet operations showing off not only the extent of data being collected but also how easy it is to access, process, analyze and utilize for monetary and other gains. This is not to say that any of these activities are illegal, but for many the knowledge that their every move in the digital space is being monitored and recorded, and is being sold on to advertisers, government bodies and regulatory authorities, may be too much to bear.

The constant debate over who ‘owns’ a customer means very little in this surreal digital data dimension. CSPs have to understand that just because their customer pays them a line subscription they don’t necessarily own them, and knowing who they call and what websites they visit barely converts into valuable assets. The moment anybody connects to a network access point, and even before that if they are mobile customers, someone, somewhere is tracking their every move, literally.

Location tracking of mobile phones is pretty accurate these days; IP and device MAC addresses can become, over time, very accurate means of linking to a person. Every financial transaction, purchase, search query, site visit, etc. helps companies like Google to build an incredibly detailed profile. Facebook’s drive into commerciality and its endless push to offer one-click secure access and identity verification into other commercial sites is just the start. ‘Shopfronts’ on Facebook are also generating some formidable profiling. Tie this with a view of one’s complete network of family and friends and the whole scenario begins to unfold.

While CSPs dabble with big data and tiptoe through the hype and hard sell, companies like Google, Amazon and Facebook have already mastered its use and are reaping the benefits. Google demonstrated the most incredible queries into petabytes of data live at TM Forum’s recent Big Data Summit in Amsterdam, with results in less than two seconds. This makes real-time analysis of a customer and linkage to other systems to offer services that they may be interested in happen in the blink of an eye.

Facebook demonstrated remarkably successful campaigns for Burberry and BT at the Middle East Summit in Dubai this week. These appealed to users they already know and are getting to know much better. The concept that analysis of customers is a grouping exercise has been shot down in flames. Averages and medians for customer profiles have proven it to be next to useless, now the average is ‘one’. Profiling to the power of one is the new creed and it’s happening even while you are reading this blog.

The telecom industry in its cautiousness may be slipping behind in the ‘data wars’ but may be viewed by customers in a more trusting light. Not being able to profile customers in real time could actually be a blessing in disguise, but only time will tell. The big issue, reverting back to the Ovum survey, is now more a concern over privacy and being ‘tracked.’

Privacy, what privacy? Even if you choose to opt out it is doubtful the data collection will stop; it may simply not be used for your benefit, but who knows what happens to it, or where it lives, and for how long. And while those data dealers may be giving regulators and customers assurances of their data’s safety, what happens if it ‘falls’ into the wrong hands? By my reckoning, the only way to avoid all of this is to become a hermit and live in a lead-lined cave in a deep ravine on an island in the middle of the Antarctic Ocean. Hmm, but these days, even that not be enough!

First published at TM Forum as The Insider

I am not planning to sing the praises of big data here but to try my best to encapsulate the key points I picked up, and there is no way I will deep dive into any of the technicalities as there are far better qualified people to do that. For the layman, which I freely admit to being, big data seems to have come about simply because we are now collecting, processing, storing and utilizing data at a ridiculously gargantuan rate, and that legacy BI technology simply can’t cope.

Every business, especially CSPs, have data being created and stored all over their networks and beyond into the cloud. It is no longer viable to collect all that disparate data, ‘normalize’ it and store it one place specifically for analysis and reporting purposes. Sure, it’s fine for historic data but these days we are talking about real-time analysis of a customer, a connection, a handset, a cell site, a router, a switch, etc. The list is endless.

My understanding is that big data, and the technologies it embodies, make it possible to access data from anywhere, in real time and generate output for a specific query in the blink of an eye. This is the sort of analysis that Google does when you search, and what Amazon does when you browse, and what mobile operators are hoping to do when offering customers new services, and also to predict when they are going to churn or need a new handset. It’s the same thinking around pushing targeted ads to mobile customers and being able to guarantee to advertisers that they have been delivered and read.

I have been hearing about customer profiling for years but this traditionally grouped like-minded types together using medians or averages to determine where they fit. As pronounced by one speaker, you can never deliver ‘average’ for a one-to-one customer experience. But it has been simply too difficult and required too much processing power to be able to do this for individuals. Not any more, big data is promising and actually delivering this ‘power of one’ today.

However, not every one of the 150+ attendees believed all they were hearing. The skeptics were not necessarily vocal, but certainly cautious. A number spoke of big data’s current position in the famous Gartner hype curve. Most thought it positioned at the peak of inflated expectations phase, about to slide into the trough of disillusionment. One speaker described the trough more like a very deep ravine but with short distance across to the plateau of productivity. Amazing how graphic techies can get sometimes.

One hosting and data center operator admitted to NOT using big data because she felt imminent breakthroughs in Scalable SQL technology would be more viable.

The most common word used throughout the event was ‘Hadoop’ (an open source software project that enables the distributed processing of large data sets across clusters of commodity servers) that seemed to be utilized by almost everyone in some fashion. For sheer shock value the Google presentation demonstrated the massive processing power being offered to governments and corporations and just how effective big data was in being used to do queries in seconds that would have taken days only a few years back. The fact that the whole internet can today be indexed in 30 minutes, a process that used to take four days, is mind-boggling.

There was no shortage of case studies by leading operators as well as eBay, Google, Microsoft, Verizon, Telefónica and CapGemini, to name a few. Needless to say, I have now become a ‘believer’ and will be keeping a close eye on advances in big data and how it can be best applied to the telecom industry.

First published at TM Forum as The Insider

Skype has already become the largest carrier of international voice traffic on the globe and, apart from a handful of operators terminating their calls to the traditional phone networks, most will have felt the effect on their revenue stream.

The industry’s headlong rush into offering high-speed data service via fixed-line, cable, 3G, LTE and Wi-Fi is admirable but potentially suicidal. It now means that anybody that can replicate traditional voice and messaging services can threaten the service provider’s money flow.

The latest, and perhaps the greatest threat is coming from none less than Facebook. It has just updated its Messenger for iPhone application to allow people in the USA and Canada to make free voice calls to their social network friends, and there are billions of them out there. In fact, if you start to consider Facebook as potentially one communications network, it is, by far, the biggest in the world. How long before it offers this service internationally and extends it beyond ‘friends only?’

This calling functionality makes Messenger into more than just an SMS or iMessage challenger. Now Facebook is potentially a bona fide threat to carriers. But ‘The Verge’ seems to think the bigger play here is for teen attention. “With free calling, Facebook has built itself a large enough straw to drink out of the fountain of youth. Teens carry around iPod Touches and smartphones with limited or shared voice and data plans. Even if texting is their first love, they probably still want to make actual phone calls on occasion.”

I am not so sure that voice will catch on with today’s youth that seem, at best, to be mutes with very fast fingers. However, there are many ‘older’ users of Facebook that will see the advantage of being able to call family and friends because typing isn’t their thing.

Interestingly, for the conspiracy theorists out there, the VoIP features are only available on the iPhone app at this stage. Is this an extension of the love affair between Apple and Facebook we have seen growing for some time now, at the expense of the evil ogre, Google and its Android empire? Probably nothing quite as sinister as that because many Facebook users have Android phones, too.

However, it seems that everyone is now playing in the space. Microsoft with Skype, Google with Google Talk, Facebook with Messenger, Apple with FaceTime and all made possible because of the fantastic connectivity provided by CSPs.

Despite countless reports, analysis, theories and suggestions on how CSPs should diversify and monetize things they are not familiar with, the core element they provide – connectivity – continues to being undervalued. The awful ‘dumb pipe’ analogy raises its ugly head every time this is discussed but extracting the best value out of that pipe has to be every CSP’s objective.

If charging more for data plans, limiting data usage and abuse, wholesaling services to the OTT players that are eating away at their revenues, charging them for their share of the traffic consumed (a new two-sided business model perhaps) or just becoming a commodity provider is the way to go, then its probably time to start thinking seriously about it.

One wonders if the big OTT players don’t see the entire communications industry as a fragmented, ultra-competitive, highly regulated, big spending, mishmash of ‘old school’ businesses they have very little in common with. Will we see them start to invest their billions in developing their own infrastructure (as Google has done in a small way) or will they wait for existing infrastructure players to falter under the triple burden of revenues under pressure, increased technology spending and less than enthusiastic investors and stakeholders?

First published at TM Forum as The Insider