Monday, July 24, 2017

"Layer Zero" Illustrates Broader "Value" Problem for Telcos

The industry audience listening to a talk by Marcus Weldon, Bell Labs president, about the drivers of future value in the next era of telecommunications drew immediate laughter when Weldon talked about where telecom sits in the end user’s estimation of value.

Go to 08:30 minutes into the video if you just want to hear the discussion of where telecom sits in the perception of value. Or watch starting at about four minutes in if you want to hear the Bell Labs vision of how "value" will be created in the next era. 

 
The point is that we work in an industry that once was considered layer one of a seven-layer model with “applications” at the top, but now is said by a growing number of observers to be at layer zero. 

Sure, the open systems interconnect model was created to illustrate the way modern programming should be done, but the idea has come to illustrate the "dumb pipe" problem as well.

To the extent that value is found "higher in the stack" at layer seven, then the logical corollary is that things happening at layer zero do not have as much value. 


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