In the telecommunications sector the process of “commoditising hardware” has developed in parallel with the process commonly referred to as the separation of infrastructure and services. This process has meant that today the broadband networks, thanks to which the Internet is accessed, are used as a platform through which subjects who do not have telecommunications networks (Skype, Google, Facebook) actually replace the operators of telecommunications to offer services to end users.
This is a process that has been going on for some time that I have had the opportunity to face and deepen on repeated occasions, most recently in the book that I published last year, where, moreover, I have had the opportunity to dwell on the fact that the inter-sectoral competition between subjects belonging to the world of telecommunications and subjects belonging to the world of Over The Top is today distorted by heavy regulatory asymmetries existing between Europe and the United States in terms of current legislation on privacy protection and personal data protection. However, an in-depth study of these issues would require an ad hoc conference.
As regards the development of the telecommunications sector over the next 25 years, I am inclined to think that the paradigm of separating infrastructure from services is an absolutely irreversible process. At the same time, however, I think that the services offered today via the internet or the potential linked to the creation and introduction of services with greater added value such as e-health (that is, more sensitive services both in terms of security, fraud prevention and malfunctions, both in terms of confidentiality of the information conveyed) are today penalized and held back by service quality levels which, precisely by virtue of the undifferentiated and indistinct evolution of the Internet network, tend to become uniform downwards.
Therefore, there is an opportunity for telecommunications operators to present themselves as subjects capable of providing a series of guarantees and safeguards that meet the needs of the different services and different users. The telecommunications operators offering services that respond to the different specific needs of the different services, ie would have the possibility to go through the hardware generalization process in reverse. A process that does not imply a return to a past in which each service corresponded to a different network but rather the evolution towards a single network capable of adapting flexibly to the needs of the various services.
Telecommunications operators must regain the opportunities for differentiation offered by the equipment and technology in use today. The only way to try to restore value to infrastructures is through their differentiation and exploitation of their intrinsic potential. On aspects related to the quality of guaranteed services, security, respect for confidentiality, telecommunications operators enjoy a widely recognized leadership. In fact, in this area we are already talking about the important role that telecommunications operators could play within the nascent sector of management of so-called digital identities.
In order to be able to carve out a role in the ICT sector of tomorrow that is not only that of bit carrier, telecommunications operators must therefore, in my opinion, focus on the differentiation and specificity of the services offered which they do not necessarily have to grant with those of a single service but which may also concern a set of services with similar needs and characteristics.
ICT is an incredibly dynamic sector that has been able to change other sectors but above all it has been able to change itself. Technological progress represents the exogenous variable that the sector is unable to control. What is even more incredible, however, is that the same subjects who have contributed most of all in terms of financial and technological resources to the construction of the Internet, have not been able to anticipate and correctly interpret the market consequences triggered by the advent of Internet. In the first decade of the last century, telecommunications operators concentrated on the network level, i.e. on the only level that they had deemed worthy of their attention as it was the only one that implied the type of infrastructure investment to which telecommunications operators were been used for more than a century. History has proven them wrong.
Today the value lies elsewhere. And once again it is not at all surprising that even today the opportunity to create value lies where there is the possibility of differentiating oneself and offering one's customers something different from what competitors can offer. There is no going back: hardware has lost much of its value, services and infrastructures have lost that intrinsic link that had characterized the past century. However, this does not mean that the networks and network operators cannot offer something more in terms of those accessory features which can make the difference for a telecommunications service.
The challenge for telecommunications operators today is to accompany the development of new and more performing fixed network infrastructures (fiber optic networks) and mobile networks (LTE networks) without losing sight of the ultimate goal which must be to offer new services capable of creating added value for the end customer (willingness to pay). In the ICT field, competitive advantages are built in a few quarters. Telecommunications operators will have to try to take advantage of the transition to the new networks to immediately build an ecosystem of services of which they form an integral part, also by virtue of the fact that they are the only subjects entitled to model the performance of these new networks in function the specific needs of the services.
Although it is not easy to imagine what future developments in the sector might be, what we can say with certainty is that the innovation and dynamism that ICT is able to generate will continue to play a fundamental role in the growth of Western economies. Bringing telecommunications operators back to the center of this process must therefore be considered a priority objective from the point of view of competitiveness and well-being of the entire country system.
