Fiber, Phones, and Farewells: The Reshaping of Telecom's Landscape

Full Transcript

Don Kellogg 0m10s

Hello, and welcome to the two hundred and eighty fifth episode of the week with Roger, a conversation between analysts about all things telecom, media, and technology by Recon Analytics. I'm Don Kellogg, and with me as always is Roger Etner. How are you doing, Roger?

Roger Entner 0m23s

Hey. I'm great.

Don Kellogg 0m24s

Roger, so we've got some personnel changes. I've kind of revisited the telecom space. This is always something that's going on, but there's some news coming out of Charter. You wanna tell us about it?

Roger Entner 0m34s

Yeah. So Nick Jeffrey got announced chief operating officer of Charter. He will basically have the same remit that Chris Winfrey had when he was chief operating officer. It was like basically field operations and marketing. Nick Jeffrey comes from Frontier, where he did a phenomenal job improving the operations of Frontier and making it ready for an acquisition by Verizon.

Roger Entner 1m5s

If you go step even further back, he was like CEO of Vodafone in The UK. So he has like very deep mobile experience with that. He has very deep fiber experience that makes him like an ideal candidate for somebody like Charter that needs to improve its performance. We all know that they are doing phenomenally well in mobile and less than phenomenally well on home Internet. So we have here a executive with a terrific pedigree and great success, sorry, in the past joining Charter.

Roger Entner 1m42s

He's joining them in September. So I was like, oh, that's a really early announcement. But I would say it's probably noncompete or something like that. But I would say that somebody like Nick will take the next six months that he's not with Charter to intensively prepare for that job. Some people were like asking me, Oh, is he going to be the successor of Chris Winfrey?

Roger Entner 2m9s

To which I just replied, Chris is 49 or 50, and Nick is 58. Typically, people who are older are not succeeding people who are younger. On the other hand, we have all seen what happened at Verizon. Right? So nothing is impossible, but it's unlikely.

Roger Entner 2m30s

Nevertheless, Sandra can use help. And the market is not that heavily seeded with executives who have successful track record in multiple industries. And so congratulations to Charlie, congratulations to Nick. You know, another topic which should become really, really interesting is we've talked about this for a while and it becomes even more interesting and that's the topic of rural consolidation. We've talked about it, that we're seeing basically what happened in wireless, you know, fifteen, twenty years ago, the consolidation of the small world wireless guys into the national players we're seeing extensively now in the smaller ISP market.

Roger Entner 3m16s

Especially one of the drivers is, and this came out very clearly at Metro Connect, nobody wants to be the fiber overbuilder of the fiber provider and the cable provider. The investment dollars are not going into having three terrestrial players fighting it out with at least one, if not two, if not more, FWA providers. So instead of having somebody build a second fiber provider, that money that would have gone into that will go into buying these smaller rural providers and then patch this all together.

Don Kellogg 3m50s

There are a lot of them. There are over 3,000 ISPs in The US, right? There's a lot of consolidation to happen, right?

Roger Entner 3m56s

Yeah. And we're tracking what, 1,200 in our system? Yep. Something like that. And we're writing reports on 500 of them, where we have enough sample where we can actually talk meaningfully about them and do that.

Roger Entner 4m12s

So, you know, I'm going to be at ConnectX. I'm going to be at Fiber Connect. I'm speaking, I think at both, before I go May to Europe to look at what we can do there. Gonna be probably six weeks in Europe and see wonderful places to meet nice people. It's gonna be very, very interesting what we're gonna see in rural America.

Don Kellogg 4m37s

The other thing I thought was interesting and noteworthy, we should probably talk about is five g Americas is officially

Roger Entner 4m45s

Winding now.

Don Kellogg 4m46s

Right? We we got the notice for that a while back. I think you actually called this a couple years ago. Right?

Roger Entner 4m51s

Yeah. So five g Americas, previously known as four g Americas and three g Americas, was really a very good education organization for industry analysts. Their annual meeting with us industry analysts was actually my favorite event of the year. I learned so much at the place. But fundamentally, when you look at it, of what happened there, being an educator of industry analysts was not enough.

Roger Entner 5m23s

I know that they tried to influence what happened inside the Beltway. There was some work. They didn't have much impact. The white papers were not as widely read as they should have. And then, you know, there was the power dynamic between AT&T and T Mobile, basically.

Roger Entner 5m42s

Neville Ray, who I like very, very much and greatly respect, basically very adeptly used five gs America as almost like his personal industry association. But that also meant that AT&T couldn't pull out. Ultimately, it came in. Sprint was there, and then Sprint left because T Mobile bought them. So AT&T was there in the boat with five g Americas to be a counterpoint of that and not to give Neville like a run of the show and that he could say on an independent basis all the great things about T Mobile.

Roger Entner 6m19s

And so they alternated that. But then, you know, Neville left and Ulf took over and Ulf was lukewarm towards five gs America as he didn't use it even halfway as well as Neville did, and then Ulf leaves the building. And then you had nobody from T Mobile who actually supported this thing. AT&T, I always felt like, was, like, begrudgingly there. And when there was no, like, real reason for this, then it collapsed.

Roger Entner 6m48s

And when you look at it, Chris Pearson was there. He then suddenly fell sick, and I hope he's better, but he very abruptly left. And Chris was close to Neville. And I didn't think that helped too much. And so in the end, they always put together fantastic events.

Roger Entner 7m7s

But then last year was only remotely. And, you know, this year, now it's not. It's a shame that it went away. I always liked it. At the other hand, I saw this coming, is they were not as impactful as they could have and should have been outside the analyst community.

Roger Entner 7m26s

And they didn't play the power politics extremely well. That's when you die as an association, because you live and die through your members.

Don Kellogg 7m35s

They'll be messed. I attended a number of their events as well, and, you know, as you say, it's always a great opportunity to learn more about what's going on in the industry, what's coming on the technology roadmap, you know, before it gets deployed by the carriers. And just a great place to meet people, you know, like the whole analyst community would show up and you see the same familiar faces alongside you there.

Roger Entner 7m57s

What they did for analysts was phenomenal. It would be greatly missed. On the other hand, it also shows a little bit the lessening importance of having an event for analysts. You know, it was not only AT&T and T Mobile who was there, but also a whole series of vendors. And it also serves for vendors as like their kind of informal analyst event, where they could send literally their brightest and their best and their most insightful experts to help educate the analysts, but also properly represent them as companies.

Roger Entner 8m32s

You know, analyst events are a very expensive event. I'm always blown away how some smaller vendors can pull together an analyst event because this is not cheap. And here they got, by banding together, they got, you know, not the stage by themselves, but the stage shared with others, but also the cost was like shared. But yeah, I will miss this dearly, but this was the train wreck in slow motion.

Don Kellogg 9m1s

All right. Well, rest in peace, five gs Americas. You'll be missed.

Roger Entner 9m5s

Roger,

Don Kellogg 9m7s

we'll talk to you next week.

Roger Entner 9m8s

Alright. Thank you.