By Bob O'Donnell on October 4, 2016, 10:45 AM
If you ever want to enliven a cocktail party filled with executives from the telco or cable industry, just start talking about dumb pipes. As in, “your service doesn’t offer anything more than a simple connection from my devices to the internet content I want—it’s a dumb pipe.”
Of course, most of you will never have to worry about going through such an awkward social encounter, but if you do—that zinger is bound to get things going.
All kidding aside, the notion that carriers and other service providers offer little more than basic connectivity has been an industry hot button for some time. Even now, despite a number of efforts to spice things up, most telcos and cable service providers are seen as companies that provide a very indistinct connectivity service that people only reluctantly pay for.
The primary differentiators for competitive players in this space are price, price and, oh yeah, price, with maybe a bit of coverage or service quality thrown in for good measure. It’s little wonder that many consumers hold these companies in such low esteem—they just don’t see the value in the services beyond basic connectivity. It’s also not surprising that so many people are looking at cord-cutting, cord replacement, or other options.
But it doesn’t have to be this way.
The amount of data that telco and cable service providers have access to should allow them to generate some very interesting, useful and valuable services that consumers should be happy to pay for. Now, admittedly, there are some serious privacy and regulatory concerns that have to be taken into consideration, but with appropriate anonymizing techniques, there are
