We need a fitting way to close our exploration of telecom evolution through “facilitating services”, and the Telecom Ecosystem Group has offered a possible one with their report “An Ecosystem Model: Innovation in the CSP Supply Chain”. While the TEG isn’t strictly a standards body, it is a body I believe to be more rooted in the telco mindset. If a group like this were to promote an aggressive and revolutionary strategy, it might play a role in advancing telecom innovation, as it hopes it will. If it doesn’t, then it offers an excuse to hunker down on the old and comfortable approaches that have failed so far. Or maybe a justification for having done so. Let’s look at the report and see where it falls.
The opening of the paper is maybe-or-maybe-not in that regard. “But telecom innovation has been slowed by a failure to engage all relevant players effectively, particularly including start-ups and smaller vendors.” Yes, it’s true that any real advances for telcos will have to come through a broader set of advances from a much broader set of players, so this is hopeful in that regard. But then, “TEG recommends a bottom-up approach to building telecom ecosystems for specific use cases.” This sounds awfully like a reiteration of supply-side planning. Fortunately, once we get into defining an “innovation ecosystem”, we find truly hopeful thoughts, but still mixed with some conservatism.
The paper is really drawn around a new and broader vision of the innovation ecosystem that’s needed for telcos, their vendors, and tech in general:
“Innovation Initiative Ecosystems are intended to create an environment with few constraints and that encourages innovation through interactions between partners to address the broader activities that enable, incubate or facilitate innovations in a specific area (e.g., semiconductors, software, wireless technology, etc.) or in an industry or market segment (e. g., Open RAN, Cloud, Network Equipment, Consumer Devices, etc.), beyond just telco-vendor supply interactions.”
A lot of this kind of documents fall prey to glittering generalities, and that’s the case here. The TEG model as presented seems to be focused as much or more on organization and promotion as on realization. It divides things into innovation initiatives and innovation supply ecosystems, and the latter is still focused on the technology-to-products-to-service relationships that drive infrastructure-building today, and engage traditional vendor partners. It still presumes that the telco buyer is driving change through some version of an RFP process. What it does do is recommend expanding this supply innovation partnership to include other players, and it offers a very complete tabular listing of what other players might be involved.
It seems to me that the “innovation supply ecosystem” is the present, in the TEG model, and the “innovation initiative ecosystem” is where a real advance would have to be focused. This is reinforced by the comment on the methodology for each: “The TEG considers that the Top-down approach is more suitable for innovation initiative ecosystems, while the Bottom-up approach is a better fit to the innovation supply ecosystems.” The paper goes into a methodology to align the innovation supply and innovation initiative ecosystems, and this is also reasonable in high-level “management-sized” terms, and to explain how the model would work, it then goes into a series of use cases. And there is where, IMHO, the whole concept goes off the rails.
The paper develops a number of “use cases”, and the examples include DSL-based access (hardly much of an innovation example), deployment of “proprietary telecom infrastructure software” (too vague and focusing on supply not higher-level initiatives), application-aware networking with SLAs (the best of the lot, but we’ll dig deeper below). The use cases take up a lot of space (from page 8 to page 19 of the paper) but even the best of the lot only touches the fringe of something that’s actually an “initiative”. Thus, the paper fails to develop the thing that’s its best suggestion, the higher-level initiative piece. The future, in TEG terms, is great because of the fusion of innovation and supply, but we’ll leave innovation to your imagination.
The use case for application-aware networking is a good way of looking at the potential here, and at why perhaps it’s not realized fully. The word “application” isn’t precise enough to be confident about just what the target is, but the description said the mission was to evaluate introducing “a new technology to a large US telco to monitor applications at business customer sites” with the goal of determining the network features needed. This implies, of course, that the “applications” are already running there. I got data from 418 enterprises in the last year, and of that group every single one said that their primary goal was to reduce the cost of supporting their applications. Not adding QoS features or SLA stuff or whatever, but subtracting costs. The same group’s overall view was that they’d likely pay no more than perhaps a “couple percent” more for any service quality improvements. Thus, what we have here is a stated goal of losing money for the telco, based on user attitudes.
This exposes the big issue, which is that it’s useless to target applications already running. They’re running because they’re working to make the business case. If they’re doing that already, there is little value in changing service parameters because the current values are adequate. So, change costs. The target applications that telcos need to address aren’t the applications already running, but the applications that aren’t runnable yet. If there are technical barriers to doing new things that would bring new business benefits and justify new telecom spending, then pulling those barriers down is a useful step for telcos to take.
What’s missing in the paper is a way of getting to those not-yet applications. The notion of an “innovation initiative ecosystem” is surely at least semantically aimed at that goal, but there’s no detail on how that might work, and the problem is that we can’t define a use case for something that’s not being done. So how could this approach introduce that which is needed?
The best way would be through some “innovation initiative group”, built with participants from the software community (what is an “application” if not software?) and the user community. This group should not include traditional network vendors, for the simple reason that they would immediately work to ensure that nothing was discussed that couldn’t build their sales in the current quarter/year. You have to form committees to solve problems from the people who have the problem to solve, and it’s the applications we need at this stage.
Best-ness isn’t exactly synonymous with “telco” though. A perhaps-satisfactory alternative would be to draw on the tech market scuttlebutt, the stories about hot things that are emerging. In some cases, these things are actually at least implicit in some telco plans. 5G, I think, is implying a shift toward real-time applications. OK, what software is missing there? You are never going to find missing things by monitoring; if they were there to be monitored they wouldn’t be missing.
I’d like to see the TEG look at this point. I’m not saying it would be easy to address, because the problem at the high level is that we don’t have bodies that take that top-down approach the paper recommends for “initiatives”. Thus, I think that what the TEG should look at is the process of “initiative collecting”, meaning drawing inferred needs from media activity and the work already being done by supply-side planners who claim to be assessing future needs. If we could expand out from simply identifying a need to identifying the “ecosystem” that would have to create it, which would necessarily focus strongly on the software applications, we could do something useful.
