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I work in a Telco Fortune500, thanks for a great argument for why telcos didn't innovate.

sgt101 2y ago
>I work in a Telco Fortune500 Sorry to hear that friend ;o) I hope that the pay is good/useful and your work environment is positive. >great argument for why telcos didn't innovate. I really think it is all down to not having the money. Regulation, legacy costs and costs required to sustain the core business have drained telcos of all cash. I think that this has been especially painful for Europe and is political - for example in the UK there was even a special tax to claw back £600m from BT at one point. Add in the costs of 3G licenses which must have been £30b or more overall then you can see why Europe doesn't have a competitive technology sector built on it's telco heritage. This all happened during the .com boom when Amazon and Google were evolving - imagine what would have happened in Europe if even 30% of that cash had been available to support innovation.
- nolist_policy 2y ago
  The telcos all stripped themselves in a race to the bottom. They outsourced everything that wasn't nailed down.
  - sgt101 2y ago
    Everyone has outsourced anything that isn't nailed down, that's why not to pay attention to ceo's threatening to outsource you. If they can/could they will/would no matter what. The threats just mean that they can't. There is nothing special abut telco's in this regard. Telco's don't have leverage to compete on anything but price really, they don't have the capital to innovate, they are prevented from vertical integration by regulation, customers will not pay for service... and it's expensive. So, it's bargain basement time. Their investors have piled them with debt and now are looking at them as an annuity business. One big issue is that humans only have very limited bandwidth requirements and so much networking can be done in the data center vs out on the edge now. This means that I don't really see another generation of edge networking coming along and realistically this does reduce telcos to the old utilities that they once were. Time for renationalisation?

>I work in a Telco Fortune500 Sorry to hear that friend ;o) I hope that the pay is good/useful and your work environment is positive. >great argument for why telcos didn't innovate. I really think it is all down to not having the money. Regulation, legacy costs and costs required to sustain the core business have drained telcos of all cash. I think that this has been especially painful for Europe and is political - for example in the UK there was even a special tax to claw back £600m from BT at one point. Add in the costs of 3G licenses which must have been £30b or more overall then you can see why Europe doesn't have a competitive technology sector built on it's telco heritage. This all happened during the .com boom when Amazon and Google were evolving - imagine what would have happened in Europe if even 30% of that cash had been available to support innovation.

nolist_policy 2y ago
The telcos all stripped themselves in a race to the bottom. They outsourced everything that wasn't nailed down.
- sgt101 2y ago
  Everyone has outsourced anything that isn't nailed down, that's why not to pay attention to ceo's threatening to outsource you. If they can/could they will/would no matter what. The threats just mean that they can't. There is nothing special abut telco's in this regard. Telco's don't have leverage to compete on anything but price really, they don't have the capital to innovate, they are prevented from vertical integration by regulation, customers will not pay for service... and it's expensive. So, it's bargain basement time. Their investors have piled them with debt and now are looking at them as an annuity business. One big issue is that humans only have very limited bandwidth requirements and so much networking can be done in the data center vs out on the edge now. This means that I don't really see another generation of edge networking coming along and realistically this does reduce telcos to the old utilities that they once were. Time for renationalisation?