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Telecom Catalyst

By Daniel Briere

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Briere is CEO of TeleChoice, a market strategy consultancy for the telecommunications industry. E-mail him.

Where have all the good phones gone?: 04/11/07; In my office, I get to try out all sorts of new gear and technologies. And with all this testing come boxes full of gear that didn't quite work as promised, or didn’t earn a place in my daily office life.
2007: The year of motion applications: 02/19/07; Several times over the years, I've suggested you corner your CEO and whisper some sweet IT in his/her ear. Well, it's that time again - you can help drive some near-term innovation and differentiation into your firm's product lineup that builds on an up-and-coming technology: motion-enabled applications.
Unlocking ruling rings in more cellular chaos: 12/07/06; Last month the U.S. Copyright Office put into effect a ruling that allows cell phone users to unlock their phones.
Carriers: Make stopping spam a priority: 10/16/06; All the well-lobbied interests are getting their way - TV is coming to a telco near you, if you fit the demographics. If you are in Maine, New Hampshire or Vermont, forget about it - Verizon wants to sell you off. If you live in rural areas, you may not even get broadband
Do you know where your cell phones are?: 08/21/06; Let's face it: Wireless is out of control. It's invading everything from tennis shoes to your skin. The days when wireless was a simple cell phone are gone. Wireless is everywhere.
Trade show tips that make life easier for all: 03/13/06; I am back from another trade show and am doing all my postconference processing. Once again, I'm dealing with all the typical postconference headaches, which follow the inevitable conference headaches, which were preceded by the preconference headaches. I am amazed that so many people are still making life hard for us analysts and writers.
Moore's Law, Metcalfe's Law; now McGuire's: 01/16/06; We're now in the Age of Mobility, governed by the Law of Mobility. Thanks to cost reductions of Moore's Law, scalability resulting from Metcalfe's Law, convergence and miniaturization of devices and increasing ubiquity of 3G wireless networks, the cost of making any product (especially one involving information) available all the time is plummeting. Therefore, McGuire concludes, just as computing power and the Internet have been built into virtually every product, mobility is beginning to be built into every product.
Where's Walt Disney when you need him?: 10/24/05; We have a government busy moving pieces around the telecommunications game board. Where are our national plans for an EPCOT 2014, our New Songdo City? I guess they're on the shelf, next to our national alternative energy strategy - in the TBD section.
It’s an XML world: 09/12/05; There’s enough experience now with the earlier adopters to project where your XML weak spots are going to be as your organization scales with XML.
Three wireless IT products to keep tabs on: 07/25/05; There’s enough experience now with the earlier adopters to project where your XML weak spots are going to be as your organization scales with XML.
Defending the castle: 06/06/05; There's nothing like having a flaming pig hurled over the wall to get your attention - medieval kings and lords quickly changed their defensive plans and took the battle to the field. Today's environment is more akin to a hand-to-hand battle, with the good guys and bad guys intermixed, and you need new approaches to adequately defend against that.
We interrupt this broadcast . . .: 04/04/05; When radio was the only thing on the airwaves, it was easy to communicate to the masses. But now the options are too varied. Alerting approaches need to be varied, too. With all the taxpayer money spent on homeland security, it's downright insulting that human processes and fax machines still are driving state evacuations - even false ones.
Carriers: Banking on no surprises: 02/07/05; We're not out of the woods yet. Activity and hype don't always equal positive results. It's important as an industry not to always drink the Kool-Aid that everyone else is drinking and be thoughtful about buying into new trends. Things are not always as they seem.
Land of the Giants or of the Lost?: 12/06/04; Eat or be eaten. Times have not changed that much. But the ability of the market to sustain three large players seems to have passed. We're continually moving toward twosomes. If you aren't going to be happy with that outcome, then you need to start voting with your dollars to keep innovation alive or to speed the death of those who can't keep up.
How one community got DSL: 10/11/04; So why couldn't we sign up? Jim explained that the databases for the community were basically empty, and lacking any solid data, the system just rejected us.
Telecom policy gets political: 08/23/04; It makes no sense to me that our government is not only incapable of formulating policies that encourage true broadband deployment but also seems unable to get out of the way of those who would.
So I stole your identity . . . sue me!: 06/28/04; Unfortunately, the law does not appear to be on our side. We should not have to rely on proving to a police investigator that situations such as this could be really damaging. Washington needs to reaffirm the intent of its legislation to be binding in civil and criminal cases, and put some real legal teeth into civil statutes to allow discovery of identities in cases where such flagrant abuse has occurred.
The Rodney Dangerfields of telecom: 05/03/04; Is it just me, or have telecom services gone to hell lately? From my cell phone to landline to cable modem Internet services, it seems that things are breaking more - not just once, but repeatedly. .
Quick fix is no fix for spam: 03/08/04; My cable modem provider, Charter Communications, responded to the Blaster virus last summer by turning off UDP on the network. Sure, this stopped the Blaster virus from spreading on its network. But in Charter's infinite wisdom to protect me from the viruses, the company also disabled my Trend Micro virus-protection software's ability to update itself over the network.
Has anything really changed?: 01/12/04; There's a danger that the same forces that took our telecom industry ball and ran with it - into the ground - are rearing their heads again.
Hey telco, where's my support?: 10/13/03; Telco Web sites today are nothing more than user manuals online. They need an overhaul so that they reflect the most-often-asked questions and how to resolve them. Telcos need to level-set support for all their services and provide a common interface for getting information.
Needed: A return to simplicity: 07/14/03; I don't have time to shop around. My clients don't, either. Neither do your customers. Now's the time to look at the product lines and ask whether they really need to be that complex, or that niche-oriented, or that specialized. If you find yourself getting sick of all the brand names in your product lines, your customers could be sick of it, too.
The truth will set us free: 05/26/03; The telecom industry needs to get back to selling on its merits, selling where it belongs, selling what it has now and working to rebuild a sense of reasonable expectations in the market. People have said this over and over, but I'm just not sure it's sinking in.
Next up: RBOCs troubles: 03/24/03; So when people say the RBOCs have won and are sitting pretty, I have to wonder. From where I sit, the issues are very tough and will require investment, creative and differentiated services, and swift and reactive decision-making. These are all counter to what we've seen from the RBOCs lately.
Gadgets show IT's future: 02/03/03; Now more than ever, there's a hidden message in gadget mania, and it has to do with your telephone company, its future offerings and your IT environment. Consumer-goods manufacturers are in a rush to network-enable everything under the sun. With that network-enablement comes a host of new services, gadgets and trends that will undoubtedly affect businesses.

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