Interesting to see both GSMA and ETNO Association announce new leaders today; Vivek Badrinath & Alessandro Gropelli respectively. ETNO is also changing its name to Connect Europe. Badrinath has history at Vantage Towers and also enterprise IT roles, while Gropelli has a background in #telecoms PR. I've vigorously criticised both organisations in the past - both in terms of their actions and statements on behalf of members, and specific to their interactions with me. I've taken issue with their lobbying on everything from #spectrum policy, to attempts to break #NetNeutrality, or advocacy of RCS messaging. The GSMA once invited me to an event & then disinvited me at the last minute, and also booted me off a 6GHz webinar for asking awkward questions. One of ETNO's previous heads tweeted that I was a shill and then had to backtrack to insults when told that my clients included several of his own members. Both also have a habit of commissioning various dubious reports from consultants, frequently cross-referencing each other, on topics such as 5G and the supposed "imbalances" of the Internet ecosystem. Hopefully, the new leadership will give both organisations a much-needed push in the right direction. Ideally, both will expand and refresh their membership bases, to include new telecom mammals as well as the dinosaurs - #MVNOs, #privatenetwork operators, #towercos / infracos, wholesale / #neutralhost providers, #FTTP altnets, telco/utility hybrids etc. Some other unsolicited advice: - Take wholesale and open-access models more seriously - Create tiers of membership for private network owners (eg enterprises, municipalities) and work towards areas such as roaming / peering between public and private networks - Recognise the central roles of localised, shared and unlicensed spectrum as well as national exclusive licenses - Tone down the shrill lobbying & confrontational attitude about content / cloud companies and look for more symbiosis. Stop trying to break the Internet access model, or encouraging politicians to do it for you - Work with established groups such as W3C on APIs, and foster an attitude of telcos acting as both sellers and buyers of programmable network capabilities - Put out early drafts of consulting / position papers and invite comments or peer-review. Sanity-check things like traffic forecasts, suggested GDP uplifts etc which look obviously suspect - Confront the geopolitical elephants in the room (especially GSMA) - Stop the cringeworthy use of terms such as "digital" - Employ someone in the role of "end-user champion" to look through the lens of the customer, feeding back to members - Embrace - or at least give airtime to - contrarian views. Sometimes we're right (*cough* RCS) In short, it doesn't serve members to take maximalist or polarised positions all the time. While I like easy targets to criticise, the cycle time for hype-backfire is now much shorter (eg for #5G). Congrats & best of luck, Vivek & Alessandro.
Dean Bubley, We shall see. John
thanks Dean for provoking me to question my assumptions (yet again)
Saurabh Verma
2mo
very interesting one Dean Bubley, these advices , fully agree.
Programmable Telecoms / Communications Expert
2moAfter 17 years (2007) RCS is heading for the big times because of Apple. After many failed attempted launches, e.g. Joyn. Without a clue about iMessage's RBS strategy, and contrary to Apple's mode of operation over the past couple of decades. It's all going RCS' way, woohoo! /s At least p2p will be there of a form. As an Android user, I'll finally have more than 3 RCS conversations. Which generally look the same as my SMS chats. I tend to share pictures and videos via apps, e.g. Google photos, WhatsApp, Telegram, Slack, Discord, YouTube, etc. Depends on the community.