To win, Willetts urged CSPs to stop hanging their heads over all the over-the-top players using their network for free and start leveraging their own 4 billion-subscriber platform.
He said the revenue crunch has given way to something more essential: a margin crunch. High-margin services such as video only make up about 10 percent of overall revenue so it is essential that CSPs start to differentiate the other 90 percent. Not surprising, he said the key to rationalizing network costs is to standardize, standardize, standardize, because too much of the IT budget – meant to differentiate services – is going to customization.
“That’s basically dead money," Willets said.
But to generate new revenue and find their place in the value chain, CSPs need to stop trying to predict the next big thing and create it by becoming the enabler of the digital economy.
“We have a platform that reaches 4 billion people. The upstream companies that want to reach them are not service providers," Willetts said. “We are well positioned to [help them] deliver their digital services to market. Today we are a transport provider. The name of the game is becoming a service broker platform and moving up the value chain."
The biggest barrier to doing so? “Ourselves," he said.
“We have to find a way to do it. We have to get the points of integration right where upstream providers and downstream consumers plug in," Willetts said. He pointed out that service providers have been doing internally for other service providers for years. They just need to do it externally.
