As might be expected at a conference like the Communications Week International affair last week in Paris, which gathered representatives from every type of telecommunications organisation, the future role of Europe’s former PTTs raised some divergent opinions. The event saw France Telecom chief executive officer Charles Rozmaryn and Jonathan Solomon, director of new business strategy for Cable & Wireless Plc, at loggerheads over the future of the public telephone operator. Rozmaryn said France Telecom will not be satisfied to remain a national carrier, but will go where the competition exists. He did not, however, indicate any need for a wholesale change in France Telecom’s quasi-monopolistic structure. In fact, quite the contrary. A recent Harvard Business Review study, he noted, showed that the public or private character of an agency is not indicative of its efficiency. He further noted that a recent survey in France showed that 91% of company managers and 92% of the public are satisfied with the service France Telecom provides. Thereafter, let’s not be fanatics about monopolies or competition, let’s leave that to politics, he concluded, rather optimistically. Solomon took a more turbulent view of the future for public telecommunications operators. First, he deemed it unlikely that a national carrier can become a global carrier without a radical transformation and that, furthermore, a straight line extension of national dominance is not a transformation. Neither, he said, can a regulatory structure, conceived in a time of a scarcity of telecommunications capacity, survive in an era of super-abundance of such capacity. Communications technology, increasingly derived from super-abundant elements of sand and light, is creating upheaval in the industry that is only beginning to appear. The traditional telcos are not well constituted to ride the wave of radical change because we operate as though we were still in a period of scarcity, Solomon said. The way a telco is regulated and run today has little to do with the global village of tomorrow. In fact, in these last days of the voice monopoly, the traditional carrier may find itself reduced to a bit provider.
