Network Slicing Returns to Some Elements of Debate Over "Stupid or Smart" Networks

Network slicing, an attribute of virtualized core networks, is in many ways the latest twist in thinking about where communications network intelligence should reside. Significantly, network slicing also is foundational for thinking about what can be done with 5G networks, and why 5G platforms will be different from all earlier mobile generations.

What one can do in the core of the network fundamentally drives what services can be created and offered at the edge of the network, of course. But in the IP era, that has been complemented by a rival approach, namely creating services and value at the edge of the network.

The best examples are any “internet” apps that are created by a combination of end user demand at the edge (from personal devices) and supply by data centers likewise at another edge of the network. In other words, cloud computing is the best example of value, apps and services created entirely at the edges of any communications network, and not in the core of the network, by the network itself.

But some changes are coming, at least for communications network operators. As core networks are virtualized, and as 5G gets deployed, it will be possible to create, as a principal network function, virtual networks that can be optimized on a number of dimensions to provide differentiated features.

Quality of service, latency performance, geographic reach, security, degrees of mobility and other features of the network service can be optimized for particular use cases. The shift is from one network with a standard set of capabilities to essentially multiple networks optimized, to an extent, for the use cases.

One use case might lean heavily on latency performance; another might require predictable packet arrival; throughput or security. The promise of network slicing is that, in principle, custom networks can be created.

Some of you, with long memories, can remember heated debates in the late 1990s and early 2000s about the “right” architecture for communications networks.

source: GSMA

Telecom professionals argued for “smart networks” with intelligence in the core, while those in the data communications camp argued for “dumb networks” with intelligence at the edge.

Some of you will remember this as the debate over whether asynchronous transfer mode (ATM) or IP should be the protocol used by the next generation network. Perhaps the best example is the argument made by David Isen that the future network should be a stupid network, putting intelligence at the edge, as IP devices do.

That sort of thinking got a heated response. But, in a fateful decision, everybody decided IP was the better choice, as a practical matter. No matter the invective, the “stupid network” became the preferred network for data, even on “telco” networks.

But the basic debate never dies down completely. New thinking could arise, at least for telecom architects, as networks are virtualized. In principle, that is a move in the direction back towards core network intelligence.

One might argue that all that is involved with NFV or software defined network approaches is where intelligence is situated (in fewer network elements) or who supplies those elements (specialized or general purpose; branded gear or white box platforms).

But there always are other dimensions. Firms that specialize in supplying IP bandwidth often fall in the “dumb network” camp, by definition: their product is, in fact, simple IP bandwidth.

"I'm much more in the 'not only dumb pipe, but dumb network' camp," said Dave Schaeffer, CEO of Cogent Communications Holdings.

Virtualized networks needed to support 5G, on the other hand, supporting network slicing, for example, shift back towards smart networks, by definition, as the network itself has to act to create virtual private networks as a core function. Up to this point, VPNs have functioned as “higher in the stack” overlays on IP transport.

Network slicing makes creation of virtual networks a core network capability. It is not exactly a return to the completely “smart” or “intelligence in the core” philosophy, but it is a significant step in that direction, without the overhead and complexity of legacy telecom networks, one might hope and expect.

U.K. Telecom Revenue Dips 1.7% Per Year Since 2012

The latest Communications Industry report issued by the United Kingdom’s Ofcom shows clearly enough why innovation and new products are needed by telecommunications service provider, internet service providers, mobile operators and video entertainment subscription service providers.

Since 2012, telecom industry revenue has dropped about 1.7 percent per year.

The average monthly spend on fixed voice and internet services increased by 14.3% over the same period to £41.13. This is largely because consumers have migrated to superfast broadband services, which tend to be more expensive than standard broadband services.

Consumer spend on mobile voice and data fell by 98p (2.1 percent), despite the increasing use of 4G networks and the rapid growth in data use, up by 48 percent between June 2016 and June 2017.

source: Ofcom

Smartphone is the Preferred Internet Access Device in U.K.

Given its portability and penetration, the smartphone is the preferred device for internet access in the United Kingdom, regardless of where people are accessing the internet (at home or outside it).

Even at home, 37 percent of the time spent online is on a smartphone, Ofcom reports.  

Use of the smartphone to go online when not at home or work is even more pronounced, accounting for 72 percent of time spent online. On average, customers spend 69 percent of time at home, including 55 percent of waking hours.

However, it also shows that there has been a significant increase since 2016 in the amount of time spent online in a location other than home or work; this more than quadrupled between 2007 and 2017, to an average of two and a half hours a week.

source: Ofcom

Rate of Linear Video Decline Improves in 2Q 2018

The pace of U.S. linear video cord-cutting showed a slight improvement in the second quarter of 2018,  according to analysts at MofettNathonson. The rate of linear video decline improved to a decline of 3.3 percent in Q2 compared to 3.4 percent in the last quarter, MoffettNathanson LLC said.

While virtually nobody believes linear video actually will turn positive, the rate of decline could be slowing. And that is about the best news linear video providers can expect: a long, slow decline that gives suppliers time to transition to alternative products and other sources of revenue.

The precedent is long distance revenues and fixed network voice.

source: MoffettNathanson

Is Google a Monopolist?

Whenever antitrust action is considered, officials have to define the relevant market. Is cable TV a separate market from mobile or fixed telecommunications? That would have been a simple determination in the past. Is Facebook in a different market than carrier text messaging? Is Google in a different market than Comcast? Is Netflix in the same market as AT&T or Disney?

These days, none of those determinations is absolutely clear. Even once the relevant “market” has been defined, there are other questions: is market share a proxy for market power? To what degree?

And if market power exists, what reasonable market structures can be sustained that allow for both competition and investment? Such questions have dominated telecom regulator thinking for decades, in creating policy for mobile services.

Now questions are raised about whether Google, Facebook and a few others might have become so dominant they are able to leverage their power to stifle the development of new competitors, raising antitrust concerns. Some of those concerns are discussed in a paper by John Yun, Associate Professor of Law and Director of Economic Education, Global Antitrust Institute, Antonin Scalia Law School, George Mason University, and former Acting Deputy Assistant Director, Bureau of Economics, Antitrust Division, United States Federal Trade Commission.

“In many countries including the U.S., within general search, Google has the highest market share, which is not the same thing as market power,” says Yun. “The question is whether or not general search is a relevant product market for both users and advertisers.”

There are obvious questions, including Google’s ability to steer search results to itself, rather than pointing users to third party sites.

source: John Yun

Still, the first issue is defining the market. Is the relevant product market “general online search?” And, if so, do users actually “multi-home,” or switch between Google and other search engines even when conducting general search queries? If so, to what degree is that done?

Or does the relevant market also include specialized search engines? It could be that when conducting vertical or specialized searches, Google is not so dominant. On the other hand, “having a high overall market share in general search is more an indicator of superior quality across multiple categories of search rather than being an indicator of a lack of user choice or an inability to switch to competing sites,” Yun notes.

Further, are other advertising platforms effective substitutes for general search engines? When consumers are looking for products to buy, general search has functional substitutes, such as use of Amazon, eBay and other specialized sites, for example, or even exposure to display advertising.  In that sense, display advertising is a substitute for search, for example.

The point, Yun argues, is that Google’s general search market share “is not the same thing as market power.”

“The core antitrust allegation against Google’s search engine is that it engages in search bias—that is, Google prominently and undeservingly displays its own specialized search services to the detriment of not only rival specialized search engines,” Yun says.

There is an inherent tension for any two-sided platform based on advertising or commerce revenues: it must balance the values of users on one side of the transaction and advertisers on the other. Users want the “best quality results.” Advertisers and sellers want the greatest amount of exposure, actions and therefore sales. Google and all other search platforms always have to maintain a balance.

Up to a point, emphasizing “best results” can grow usage, and therefore help the business model (advertiser revenues grow), even if it does not especially highlight “commercial” search results.  

Conversely, too great an emphasis on highlighting “commercial results” can drive users to other platforms, harming both Google’s revenue model and results gained by its advertiser partners.  “Users place value on high quality results while advertisers place value on users and ad clicks, and their return on investment,” Yun notes.

In principle, search rankings on any page, and especially the first returned results page, always matter. The algorithms for displaying results also matter, and there is always some discretion.

A search engine such as Google can undertake design changes that affect search result placements. Emphasizing user-friendly “best results” algorithms will decrease ad click-through rates. But such algorithms also can increase the user base, and is rational.

Search engines also can choose to boost click-through rates by moving commercial results higher on the page. That boosts ad click-through rates (and therefore advertiser happiness) at the expense of user satisfaction with the search engine.

But the point is that changes in the algorithms are not, in and of themselves, evidence of abusive market power.

On the other hand, algorithms might also reduce traffic flowing to third-party sites. And that is a separate issue antitrust regulators have to consider. But even that is a complicated empirical issue.

If Google gets many more users, all other things equal, traffic flowing to third-party sites will increase, even if algorithms steer more traffic to Google sites.

“At the heart of the antitrust claim is the notion that Google not only competes, to a degree, with vertical search sites for both users and advertisers but is a significant source of traffic to these sites as well,” says Yun. “The question is whether Google is effectively foreclosing vertical competitors or raising rival’s costs in a manner that also results in harm to competition.”

If Google is driving traffic away from rivals and to itself because its product has been improved, this is the type of competition that competition laws are intended to promote, Yun says.  Alternatively, if Google implements a change that substantially reduces traffic to a group of vertical sites without a corresponding increase in user quality, then this can raise concerns.

The U.S. Federal Trade Commission has said that “while some of Google’s rivals may have lost sales due to an improvement in Google’s product, these types of adverse effects on particular competitors from vigorous rivalry are a common byproduct of ‘competition on the merits’ and the competitive process that the law encourages.”

“Monopolization and vertical contracting cases typically hinge on whether a firm has excluded competitors from the market in a way that did not benefit consumers or reduce costs,” economist Marc Rysman has said.

The bottom line is that U.S. antitrust have concluded that Google did not act in an anti-competitive way in the past. Circumstances can change, of course.

Will T-Mobile US Compete for Fixed Network ISP Accounts?

One of the biggest problems all of us have with business and life is getting transitions right, especially big disruptive transitions. Consider only the matter of consumer internet access; its retail cost, its value, speed and market structure.

To summarize, some critics complain (and always do) that consumer services are too slow, too expensive and are offered in markets that are not competitive enough.

Leaving aside for the moment that much of that is a judgment call, the rate of improvement, the cost per bit metrics (value), price that is inflation-adjusted and as a percentage of household income metrics are not out of line for any developed market, and are far better than in most developing markets.

And competition is going to intensify. Leave aside the coming future competition from constellations of low earth orbit satellites or more exotic delivery platforms (balloons or unmanned aerial vehicles).

In the near term, 5G is going to be used by mobile service providers to attack fixed network internet service providers, in some cases using 5G fixed access, in other cases simply by supporting mobile substitution.

Verizon has been the biggest, most aggressive proponent of using 5G in fixed mode to provide major new competition out of region to AT&T, Comcast and Charter Communications.

But T-Mobile US now says it expects to be a significant player in providing major new competition for internet access services provided by fixed network providers as well, if its merger with Sprint is approved. In truth, T-Mobile US is likely to do so even if the merger with Sprint is not approved.

Some might argue the purchase of video platform Layer3 works for T-Mobile US no matter what happens with the Sprint merger, as a way to provide “up the stack” video services, and also as an anchor feature for fixed internet access bundle.

“I don't think people have really thought through what's going to come,” says Mike Sievert, T-Mobile US COO, a prediction predicated on a Sprint merger with T-Mobile US.

T-Mobile US apparently expects to gain, by 2024, close to 10 million customers that formerly would have been served a fixed network. The company believes perhaps 75 percent to 80 percent of those accounts will be in metro areas, with 20 percent to 25 percent of them in rural America, Sievert says, when available speeds range from 150 Mbps to 450 Mbps or more, in some areas.

“What people haven't really connected to until recently is that with the new T-Mobile, by 2021, two thirds of the country will have greater than 100 megabit speed, so if you think about in the context of broadband, by 2024, it will be 90 percent,” he argues.

“in the underserved rural America segment, when you get out to 2024, we'll have 74 percent of them covered with greater than 10 megs, but with home CP and our in-broadband distribution opportunity that we see, you'll have 84 percent that can get greater than 25 megabits,”Sievert says.

We will have to wait and see what happens with the proposed Sprint merger, and what T-Mobile US decides to do if the merger fails. If approved, we get a new fixed network internet access competitor, in many U.S. markets, on top of what Verizon will provide. .

Let us assume that Verizon and T-Mobile US are going to be fierce and successful competitors, at scale.

That is going to reshape the fixed network internet access market in a fundamental way, removing the duopoly of “telco and cable” in markets that represent the bulk of potential customers. Where the fixed network duopoly exists, it might often be a market with four terrestrial providers and two satellite providers, with some markets where smaller independents also operate.

That is going to disrupt business models for all incumbents, terrestrial or satellite. As four to six providers is likely an unstable situation, the eventual number of leading providers is likely to eventually stabilize at some number greater than two and less than six. Mergers are possible, but antitrust concerns will exist, for any combinations of existing providers.

Still, it is hard to ignore the profound implications of full-on mobile substitution for fixed network internet access. The fixed network duopoly seems unsustainable, in some number of markets, in the near term.

In the medium term, mobile or wireless substitution is possible on a broader scale. We are gong to have to redo our spreadsheets on internet access market shares, average revenue per account and profit margins.

Telecom is Going to Resemble the Grocery or Retail Industry, in Key Respects

It appears retail communications services increasingly will resemble the retail business in becoming a place where customers buy a number of different types of services, with varying gross revenue and profit margin profiles. That is not a new trend, but will become much more the case in the 5G era.

The reason is that 5G is key to incremental revenue growth opportunities that, almost by definition, include services with very-low revenue profiles, some with moderate revenue implications ($10 to $40 a month per service) and some with high revenue per service.

Matching that growing gross revenue and profit margin picture is a more-complicated channel (distribution) picture. Many of the truly-new services have platform implications and requirements, vertical market distribution and product functionality profiles. By definition, that also means the marketing strategies must match the vertical use cases and customer bases.

That is going to make the grocery store a relevant analogy for perhaps the first time. For a mass market grocery, apparel or other consumer goods distributor, each category of products has a distinct gross revenue and ARPU profile, which is one reason grocers are adding products in the “ready to eat” category (delicatessen, for example, or in-store meals). That also is the thinking behind “store brands,” which tend to produce higher profit per unit than external brands.

At convenience stores, margins can range from a low of one percent up to 35 percent for various products.

source: Delek

So though it might seem far fetched, profit margins for various products sold by telecom firms and internet service providers are going to show more divergence. Also, many of the new revenue opportunities will be “enterprise” sales, not the consumer distribution pattern relying on mass media advertising and retail stores.

Some of the sales will go “direct to consumer,” using internal resources. In many other cases, partner retail sales entities or even asset ownership will be needed to sell products to businesses or consumers. In many other cases original equipment manufacturer (OEM) strategies wil make sense.

Overall, sales channels and methods are going to become far more complicated.

source: A. Saghaeian

As that diversification happens, each product line, and products within a line, will tend to develop more-unique gross margin profiles, but also varying cost structures.

source: Pw