Why did Many of the Visions and Standardisation Approaches of the Telecom Industry fail in the Market and especially one became a great success

​

This question has fascinated me through my long career in the traditional telecom industry. Some examples:

• ISDN and in particular BISDN (Broadband ISDN) were a huge conceptual and standardisation effort in the telecom industry which ended in the conclusion that the solutions for data communication would be based on IP (e.g. based on IP Routers). The telecom industry played no substantial role in the market rollout of these solutions with the exception of Alcatel!

• In the late 80´s a substantial conceptual and standardisation effort was targeting IN (Intelligent Networks), promising the flexible Introduction of service logic to overcome the slow introduction of features in digital switches.  Early market success  of the 800 and Global VPN voice services in US initiated the concept of integrating the IT industry products with the digital switches. The initiative promised to overcome the slow integration of new services in the digital switches through new flexible service logic in IT industry products. A few successful applications (e.g. prepaid cards in mobile networks) reached the market. However, the promise of introducing flexible service logic in the networks (taking care of the difficulties of e.g. feature interaction in digital switches) failed to materialise in the market.

• The telecom industry have in the recent years tried to find applications which can open new business areas as well as secure the own platform  success (e.g. IMS applications). Investment in  IPTV is another example. Most of these failed to open new business  areas within the telecom Industry.

​

After these more frustrating experiences for the industry we also had the great success story:

The most successful standardisation supported vision for the telecom industry was the GSM standardised mobile networks. This was based on the early implementation in the Nordic countries and resulted in an extraordinary market success for the Telecom industry!

​

A few reflections to this i have tried to show in

- The interaction of New Technologies and Development of Markets

- Products in the Network with high Margins are related to high integration Effort of the Complexities

- Break down of Network Complexities into Manageable  Network Elements

​