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SOFNET 08: The consumer now sets the telco agenda

BT strategy director: "We need to free them up"

      

The director of strategy for BT design, Matt Beal, is adamant that the role of the telco has fundamentally changed with power increasingly switching to the consumer.


“We must give them the choice to go where they want — we need to free them up from the constraints we have placed upon them in the past.”

Speaking at the SOFNET 08 Exhibition in London, Beal indicated his support for consumers of telecoms services to set their own thresholds, together with helping them to move through whatever networks and application providers they wish. “But, we have to ensure they can move safely when we enable this.”

This notion of not restricting the consumer implies open networks — both hardware and software. Commenting on this, Beal believes that there will be a requirement to understand where the consumer is within the network and what they are doing.

“Today, it’s an experiment to gain subscriber intelligence, and there is the need for a powerful solution to track consumer data points. This could be achieved using and analyzing consumer data produced from our own system combined with information from someone like Google. But we must ‘follow’ the individual, otherwise we’ll fail.”

Moving to how consumers might want to browse the network, Beal maintained that the supermarket concept does hold some value. This idea is based upon the network becoming the virtual supermarket while other providers supplied the products and perhaps a third group "stacked the shelves."

Beal claims that the value for the telco, in this particular situation, is the design of the supermarket, and, importantly, ensuring the consumer has the right to choose.

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