Choice Declines in Business Phone Systems
Posted by Cloud Net on Wed, Mar 10, 2010 @ 03:20 AM
Until this week your choice for mobile phone operator in the UK
was
3
O²
Orange
T-Mobile UK
Vodafone
After this week it is
3
O²
T- Orange
Vodafone
That's 5 operators became 4 and no one noticed (oh and 3 uses Orange's network some of the time). So it's really only 3.5. So that is one Chinese network 3, one Spanish O², one German- French T- Orange, and one British.
Of course the 4 that are left don't really want to be network operators so they subcontract anything they can so for instance most of the networks are looked after by Ericson any way.
They all want to be virtual - use some one else's network and charge for it. So lets look at how many virtual networks there are. The big guys are
ASDA Mobile
BT Mobile
Blyk
Dot Mobile
Fresh Mobile
Tesco Mobile
TalkTalk
Virgin Mobile
I make that 8 and they are all British.
May be its' me but I think that owning a network actually adds value and so did the telcos when they spent billions buying licences to do just that. It seems that they have forgotten that there is value in the infrastructure.
Some people of course still believe in value within the network, for example Cloud Net where we have developed our own VoIP network specifically for business phone systems. If you own your network then you can innovate, move forward and correct faults without having to rely on other people. It just seems the right way to do things.