I just finished my talk at the Emerging Communications Conference in Amsterdam. It was great fun to give and Brough asked the question he said he would ask. The answer is in the backup-slides. It was fun giving the presentation, unfortunately noone from Free in the audience :-)
Excellent ! So different to see Free cited as *the* role model.
ReplyDeleteI was just thinking the other day about the forthcoming 4th Mobile license here in France: if Free wins the tender, then they will come up with a true QuadPlay offer. Everything: unlimited fixed comms, unlimited Internet, IPTV, and unlimited mobile comms for 69.0€/month or something like that. With a seamless integration between home and nomade usages. It's going to shake-up the whole telco industry here...
http://www.linkedin.com/in/jmeulekamp said:
ReplyDeleteThere is a trend that we do not have to pay for voice-minutes anymore. Last but not least because of the high costs of the billing process itself (OPEX, costs of software, hardware, customer service etc). "The way voice interconnect is paid for in europe is the reason".. is partly true because major telco's have bilateral agreements in place in which lump sum is paid in case of unbalance of voice traffic between parties.However over the last 20 years more smaller telco's came to the market who are in fact only consolidating individual consumers and businesses and therefore asking carrier's and telco's a volume discount; here the per minute price will remain.Consumers want their "Digital Home Services" from one supplier if this supplier has an attractive offer. It is questionable if incumband telco's can offer this, although they are in most countries by far the largest (number of homes passed) operators. I believe that Cable Tv companies covering multiple countries will be the winners as they can benefit from the scale of economy (converged BSS/OSS platform) and their buying power towards content suppliers( TV, Movie, Games). Unbundled Local Loop might be the trigger for nice players offering simular services as Free.fr. But there's much to do, Europe is far behind with DTV, compared to Asia and USA. Penetration of DTv in NL is 5.8%, Belgium 9,5%, USA 47%. Broadband: NL 44,3%. (Source Booz/Allan/Hamilton) Key for success will be the ability to listen to your customers and time to market. Example: Google.