Douglas Green, Publisher, Telecom Reseller
You would think that owning the big fat pipe, over which everything must flow in the age of cloud, would be the best thing to have. The problem is that Internet service and many other cloud (carrier level provided) services have a vanilla like quality. The pipe provides a commodity service that is hard to make distinguishable. Accordingly, the carriers all share a customer loyalty problem. Fully 25% of their customers depart each year. Each carrier makes these lost customers up with new customers defecting from rivals, but the cost of their acquisition is high. In many cases it takes over a year for a carrier just to recoup the cost of marketing and sales built into each acquisition.
This on-going challenge might explain last year’s big announcement that AT&T would support WebRTC developers. WebRTC might be to AT&T in 2015 what agents were to Bell South twenty years ago. Decades ago, confronted with a large number of new products to sell and a burgeoning world of entrepreneurs seeking to break into telecom, Bell South developed an agent program, basically allowing anyone with a car and ambition to try their hand at selling Bell South’s services. A channel was born. Today, WebRTC might allow AT&T to in a sense allow developers to be a kind of reseller for their network services, utilizing WebRTC.
WebRTC will allow for the creation of an app store, with each app providing a unique experience over the AT&T network, be it for entertainment or for productivity. The developers get a wide-open platform to invent, a ready market of millions of users, while using WebRTC, a basically free to use code. AT&T in return gets inventions connected to its network that will permit it to create product differentiation. WebRTC might prove to be something that creates stickiness for the network.
