A Look into my Crystal Ball

I have spent quite a bit of time recently reading futurist books and articles that think about the most likely future. I’ve done this to the point where my wife asked me if I am unhappy with the present! After chuckling, I told her that I am happy now. But thinking about the future is a worthwhile effort when one is engaged in a technology-based industry. Everything I have read tells me that selling to residences is going to change a lot over the next few decades. And I believe that those who understand where the trends are taking us can begin preparing for that future today.

So what will the future residential customer want from a telecom company? Everything I have read tells me that traditional telephone service and cable TV service as we know it today will not be around. Voice will have become a total commodity. You will probably be able to put a phone in your house if you insist, but it will be an IP device and very few people will still have a traditional telephone.

Within twenty years voice will be a commodity for cellular service also and the cell phones we carry today will also be a thing of the past. There will be devices far smarter than our ‘smart’ phones. Many of these devices will be somehow integrated into our body and will be far more sophisticated than the first generation of Google glass. I am not enough of a futurist to predict the specific technology that will win the battle, but we will not be carrying around a device whose primary purpose is to talk to people.

Cable TV is headed down the same path and there will no longer be a subscription to hundreds of channels for a high price. Video will be available ubiquitously on any device you want to watch it on. People will subscribe to the programming they want and will not pay for what they don’t want.

But people will still want bandwidth at their homes – lots of bandwidth. As we move towards the Internet of Everything, where multitudes of devices will include cheap chips and will be networked together to make our lives easier, the average house will want a lot of bandwidth.

And there will be two kinds of bandwidth providers – dumb pipe providers and service providers. There are already dumb pipe providers today. I live in the country and I get my Internet access through a wireless link from a nearby tower. And that wireless link is all that my ISP sells. They don’t offer any other services over that link and I doubt I would buy them if they did. I have my smart phone to give me everything else.

Many of today’s networks will morph over time to become dumb pipe providers. They will raise the price of bandwidth until it is high enough to compensate them for their network. They will have much smaller staffs than today who will be needed just to install and maintain the network.

But there will be another kind of provider that I call a full-service provider. They will also deliver a bandwidth pipe to the house, but they will also provide a host of services. And mostly these services are going to look like a future version of today’s Geek Squad. These companies will send technicians into people’s houses to help them make everything work together. When there is an Internet of everything it is going to get complicated. People who are not very technological are going to want lots of help to customize the many options to get just what they want. And so when a technicians visits he might be asked to help a customer get a medical monitor working right, find some programming they had trouble locating, fiddle with the controls for the lighting, and put a different personality on the home AI. The service-oriented provider will build customer loyalty and will be perceived as something very different from the dumb pipe provider.

There is a lesson today from envisioning this future. Far too many service providers today sell products that they treat as commodities, and once they sell them they rarely talk to their customers unless there is a problem. Technology has already gotten complicated for the average household and I think there is already a market for sending technicians into homes to make things work together better. I have clients who do this and they say that changing to a service model is the best change they ever made. They generally sell something new every time a technician visits somebody’s home. But the vast majority of the telecom companies I know look a lot more like the dumb pipe provider. They may sell telephone and cable TV on their data pipes, but what are they going to be left with when those products turn into a commodities and then disappear into the cloud?