What Comes Next When All Networks Are Good Enough?

Full Transcript

Don Kellogg 0m10s

Hello, and welcome to the two hundred and ninety second 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 Entner. Hey, Roger. How are you doing?

Roger Entner 0m23s

I'm great. How are you?

Don Kellogg 0m26s

I'm good. Back from vacation, rested and relaxed.

Roger Entner 0m29s

Hawaii is a wonderful place. Right?

Don Kellogg 0m32s

Hawaii is a wonderful place. It was a little rainy, but apart from zip lighting in the rain, it was it was not too bad.

Roger Entner 0m39s

It beat Boston in the cold.

Don Kellogg 0m41s

There you go. There you go. But I wasn't too far disconnected because the wireless networks are pretty much good everywhere. I thought that would be a good thing for us to talk about today in terms of, like, kind of the state of the networks and what the carriers are saying about this, that sort of thing.

Roger Entner 0m55s

Sure. And especially because last week, Dan Schulman was speaking at the CEMA4 World Economic Forum Conference, right? Not forum, sorry, that's in Davos. Probably you have a lot better accommodations in Washington than in Davos. But what Dan talked about is that networks are important.

Roger Entner 1m17s

But having the best network becomes less important. He's absolutely right that we're hitting the time, and we have the time, where the networks are good enough. And we talked about it before, besides FWA, the five gs killer app is speed test.

Don Kellogg 1m37s

Right.

Roger Entner 1m38s

On a mobile device, nothing else needs multiple 100 megabits. It's great if it looks like it like that, but even if you run four ks video, all you need is 25 megabits. If it's a rock solid 25 megabits, you can watch four ks, and it's a better picture than what your eyes can pick up. The key is here, rock solid and consistent, right? You know, you and I work together with companies and, you know, I remember how many years ago is that?

Roger Entner 2m10s

Fifteen years ago, I was working with Verizon and even then they were like fretting about, oh my God, what are we going to do when we lose network superiority? And I was always about talk about what you can do with the network, not go on and on and on and serve the fetish of I'm the fastest, my g is bigger than your g type of stuff. How does your network make an actual difference in people's lives? When we look at our data, right, we clearly see T Mobile has the fastest network. That's what it is.

Roger Entner 2m44s

But does it actually matter? I think t satellite matters a lot more than them being 10 or 20 megabits faster on average than Verizon. It's a meaningless difference, other than I can argue faster is better, and I have a really, really hard time arguing against it. Still, it's a meaningless number, right? Okay, the number is bigger.

Roger Entner 3m8s

No change in capabilities. And I think what we see more and more, and we will see more and more, is to look at the capabilities. How does this make my life better? Not just that it's a number on speed test.

Don Kellogg 3m20s

Well, I mean, I think, you know, value plays a huge role too. Right? I mean, we see that value consistently plays a larger role than network in terms of drawing back to overall satisfaction. If somebody's, you know, getting 10 or 20 megabits less, but they're paying a much better price for it. And in some cases, that's kind of the story with FWA on the broadband side.

Don Kellogg 3m39s

Right?

Roger Entner 3m40s

Yeah.

Don Kellogg 3m40s

You know, it may not reach the same speeds that you would get on a cable connection, but it's a lot cheaper and and the reliability in many cases is

Roger Entner 3m48s

It's higher. Right?

Don Kellogg 3m50s

If not better. Exactly. Yeah. You know? And so does the product reliably deliver for customers to the point where they just don't have to worry about it?

Don Kellogg 3m58s

And to be honest, I think that all the wireless networks are kind of at that threshold now, where you just don't really have to worry about it anymore. Works.

Roger Entner 4m5s

Yeah. And in our metrics, over and over again, consumer cellular is delivering the happiest customers. And these are the people 60, the least technology how should I say focused segment. But it does what they want. And it solves the use case perfectly.

Roger Entner 4m28s

That's the importance here. Does the product that I deliver with all the things solve the need of my customer? If we just look at speed and all of these things, we're losing the plot, right? It's like, what are people doing? Oh, they're watching video.

Roger Entner 4m45s

Okay, they don't want to wait for the video to come on. So why don't I burst some of the carriers, and we can see it in the data, are bursting their traffic for the first couple of seconds, even though that they may speed limit what happens afterwards. But in the first couple of seconds, to make sure you don't have to wait like twenty or thirty seconds for the video to start, you just burst them and give them twenty seconds of video so that this thing starts. And so there are things where you have to look at competition and at network and what we're delivering customers in a different way. And all the carriers are talking about, oh, we're customer focused.

Roger Entner 5m23s

Then look at it from a usage perspective. How can I make this product as frictionless as humanly possible? What is actually the usage experience? This comes back to speed test again. Is the speed test that you're using actually measuring the user experience?

Roger Entner 5m40s

Or are you delivering a idealistic number, let's say this way? And there are significantly different approaches.

Don Kellogg 5m50s

So the takeaway here, right, and I think we agree on this, is, yes, the networks are incredibly impressive, and they're so much better than they used to be, you know, even five years ago. Right? But, like, is it really a competitive advantage at this point if every wireless network just pretty much you know, in the words of Steve Jobs, it just works?

Roger Entner 6m9s

Exactly.

Don Kellogg 6m9s

What is next after that? I think one of the things that's interesting, you know, we see going on from AT&T, and we talked about this the other week, is kind of the comprehensive bundling approach, right, where it's like, pay us this amount of money and it doesn't matter how many devices you have, you're set. Things like that, I think, are the next wave of competition in wireless outside of kind of the network realm.

Roger Entner 6m30s

Yeah. Exactly. It's make people happy. Don't serve the speed fetish. Right?

Roger Entner 6m37s

Yes. Somebody will always do that. But the average consumer, I don't think, cares that much as long as this works flawlessly. So that's where reliability becomes, I think, more and more important. It should work wherever I work and serve the right use case.

Don Kellogg 6m56s

Alright. We'll talk next week. Thanks, Roger.

Roger Entner 6m59s

Thank you. Bye bye.