Networks are obviously anchored in connectivity services offered by network operators, carriers, service providers, ISPs, or whatever you’d like to call them. But all these terms are going to fall away except for one, which is ISP. The only “network” anyone will subscribe to in the future will be the Internet, and the Internet and the networks that will exist within public cloud infrastructure will be the only wide-area networks, period. How I justify that, how we get there, and what that means is the subject of my final blog in this series.
There was a time when telco revenues were fairly balanced between businesses and residential users. That’s not true even today. There was a time when just getting access to 45 Mbps of bandwidth would have cost you ten thousand dollars a month. That’s not true today; you could buy service that fast for a hundred households with that budget now. The times are changing, and we need to explore why that is.
The first reason is that all the growth opportunity in number of customers comes from individuals, not businesses. The number of business sites reported by government data shows that business sites grow in major markets by a percent or two per year. Not only that, the great majority of the sites are single-site businesses who clearly don’t have any need for VPNs. Instead, they get their business services in the form of repackaged residential broadband. Not only that, if we look at the “enterprises” who represent real multi-site networking opportunity, 95% of those sites are little different from a single-site business in terms of network needs. It’s taking time, but SD-WAN is gradually eating away at VPN services.
The second reason is that the Internet has created a conduit directly to the market, reducing or eliminating the need to have “branch” locations for human-level engagement. My data shows that over two-thirds of all sales (in dollar terms) are either completed online or researched online prior to a visit to a retailer to simply pick up the product. Customer support is similarly shifting to the Internet. The effort to wring out operations costs to improve profits has induced companies to actively plan to reduce human intervention in sales/support. Every enterprise, and nearly every SMB, needs a web presence as much or more than they need a human presence, and that has already impacted the pace of growth in remote offices.
The third reason is that competition for Internet customers is improving the service quality level of the Internet. Just a decade or so ago, it was common for me to be asked to “use a landline” meaning TDM-based telephony if I was going to participate in a conference call. Today, VoIP is the rule and in most cases it’s Internet-based. Internet failures still occur, but if you catalog them by person-hours impacted you’d find that the problems are usually related to BGP routes or DNS services, not the physical access infrastructure.
Reason number four is that smartphones have become the preferred information conduit simply because they’re always available. Even people who aren’t obsessed with being in touch (among which I’d count myself) end up using a smartphone for more communication than any other option, and except for my work, I use a smartphone way more than I use a computer. This means that mobile services offer a better option for new customers than wireline, but it also means that services can now go with us, be a more direct part of our lives. And smartphones are important, even critical, because they’re our window onto the Internet.
All this adds up to a single truth, which is that “the Internet” is going to offer the lowest unit cost of bandwidth of any network option available. That means, inevitably, that it will displace other network technologies almost completely. Yes, there will still be companies that can justify direct fiber connections between major sites within a metro area, but beyond that we can expect to see business networks become business Internet.
How about applications like IoT or service features like network slicing? Aside from the fact that IoT means “Internet of Things”, does anyone really believe that we could create a vast IoT network based on anything but the most pervasive and least expensive network model, which is the Internet? And does anyone believe that we can create slices in a mobile network for any new premium service, with the baseline Internet always available as an alternative? Network slicing is probably a feature useful in supporting MVNOs, but MVNO opportunity is itself based on a desire by mobile operators to address the price-sensitive part of the market without discounting their mainstay mobile services. And we have MVNOs today, so it’s hard to say whether slicing’s contribution to that will be even meaningful.
The net of this is simple. There is no future connection service that can survive competition with the Internet, and so there is no hope that new connection services can improve operator revenues and stem the tide of declining profit per bit. Every operator in the future is an ISP, or they’re done.
It’s also true that the Internet supports a different model of “service”, one focused on the delivery of an experience rather than the support of multi-party communication. What we call “content” today is an example; we listen to online music, watch streaming video, download software, and so forth. The capacity we use to do things like VoIP or even video calling is minimal by comparison. Given that investment will tend to gravitate to the options that support the greatest return, that means that experience creation and facilitation are the future. In fact, they’re really the present, too.
The best example of this we have in play today is the Content Delivery Network (CDN). We call this a network, but it’s actually a set of cache points where content is stored, located at the inside edge of the access network so the content can be delivered as an experience with a minimum of handling. Many, including myself, believe that CDNs’ role was obvious almost from the inception of the worldwide web, and yet operators never took advantage of the opportunity, even though the fact that they sat at the access edge made them a logical player. It’s fair to say, though, that this failure wasn’t entirely their fault; regulations hampered operator entry into markets beyond simple connectivity, and that’s still the case.
Even without CDNs, though, the Internet is more than connection. You need, for example, a DHCP server to assign IP addresses and a DNS network to decode URLs into IP addresses. A CDN has to have URL mapping so that requests for content are directed to the closest cache point rather than to a specific place that might work for some users and be hopelessly impacted by latency and congestion for others. Facilitation is as important as connection, but to facilitate something you have to offer something specialized to the mission that’s being supported, which means that we have to expect that future experiences will require facilitating features that aren’t needed today.
And that’s the opportunity for the network operators who want to boost their revenues and profits, but realizing the opportunity means understanding what facilitation those future services will be. AT&T, for one, has committed to working upward from connectivity to attempt to define them, but I think the right answer is to look at contextual services, the services needed to exploit the closer ties between people and smartphones. Will an operator do that successfully? That’s the big question for the industry now, because if there is no facilitating service opportunity set realized, operators may stall investment in infrastructure and increase their demands for subsidization.
I’m hopeful that the AT&T initiative on facilitation spurs other operators to review the concept, and I’m also hopeful that AT&T and those other operators will eventually realize that they have to have a vision of the future retail services to offer any meaningful and financially successful facilitation. If I’m right, then this is the pathway operators will take to sustain themselves into the future.