Good Point>
Wireless savior required:
Apply within
By Stuart Sharrock, European Correspondent
OXFORD, United Kingdom—Romances don't always last forever.
Mostly they decay gracefully at the close of a seemingly predetermined life
cycle. Sometimes they blossom into universally admired permanent
relationships. Other times they collapse suddenly and acrimoniously,
leaving bitterness and recriminations.
The telecommunications and financial industries have been enjoying a
period of romantic involvement. The telecommunications sector managed
to retain its glamour while other industries lost their emotional appeal to
investors. The fixed network sector is still a relative favorite, wooing the
financial markets with a series of mega deals that owe little to trading
performance but a lot to maximizing asset value. Just the sort of scenario
the financial markets like.
The wireless sector has been less fortunate. The wireless sector seems to
have been suddenly jilted in some quarters. Wireless operators no longer
find funding easy to come by; the presence of established competition and
the burden of outrageous license fees has destroyed the appeal of their
business case. Wireless operators are increasingly being funded by
infrastructure manufacturers, reducing the vendors' margins and in turn
destroying their appeal to the financial community.
The financial community can relate to the fundamental changes affecting the
fixed network world. It's a world that has been turned upside down by the
Internet, and the Internet is still sexy and full of promise. Massive
opportunities in the fixed world arise from the combination of globalization,
massive demand and the need for new technologies.
The wireless world is also about globalization, massive demand and the
need for new technologies. But that message has somehow not goten
across. The wireless vision is nowhere to be seen.
Manufacturers are suffering. Alcatel has seen its share price plummet by
almost a factor of two. L.M. Ericsson is implementing yet another massive
reorganization plan. Nortel also has reorganized, dropping out of the
wireless terminal market and pulling away from the radio access business
following the Ionica debacle in the United Kingdom.
Lucent Technologies Inc. and Philips Electronics N.V. abandoned their
wireless handset joint venture. Motorola Inc. is struggling, suffering badly
from the glut in semiconductor manufacturing.
The list goes on.
The root causes are complex. Repositioning for the shift from a
voice-centric to a data-centric world, from a circuit-switched to a
packet-switched environment, is not an easy task for traditional
telecommunications vendors. Changing the culture of the slow-moving,
standards-dominated telecommunications community to encompass the
rapidly changing, anarchic environment of the IT and computer worlds is
even more difficult.
But the biggest challenge is to convince the financial and investment
communities that wireless is still an area of unfulfilled promise. The wireless
vision needs to be promoted if the romance is to come back into the
industry.
Promoting visions requires visionaries. Where are they? Where are the Bill
Gates and the Rupert Murdochs of telecommunications? You may not like
these gentlemen or even admire what they do, but you cannot deny their
effectiveness in promoting the computing and broadcasting worlds. Such
people are needed. Effectiveness matters; effectiveness gets things done.
Outstanding candidates for telecommunications visionaries within the
industry are hard to find. I can think of a few possibilities from the fixed
network sector. I have more difficulty with wireless. Who is there within
our industry who could really drive it forward, who could communicate the
vision to the outside world, who could provide a focal point for the
industry's ambitions? |
