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The great irony here is that the traditional networks that are the foundation of the Communications Service Provider business are can in fact become anchors weighing down slow the business. With consumers paying less to get more each year, the Communications Service Provider must continuously create new services and provide more bandwidth at a lower cost each year just to remain viable as a business yet is prevented from doing so by the . The underlying proprietary network technologies, underwhelming Network Equipment Provider product roadmaps and lock-term contracts that commit them to closed supplier ecosystemstechnologies and closed supplier ecosystems prevent the Communications Service Provider from leveraging the open market to introduce new capabilities to reduce costs.
Paradoxically, while CSPs face increasing competition and commoditisation of offerings in an open market, their suppliers do not. The suppliers compete against each other but not . Their against the broad technology industry. Their Network Equipment Provider supply chain is not exposed to the same open market competition and commodification and offering roadmaps remain proprietary, limiting the ability for others to innovate to reduce costs or create new sources of revenue. The CSP’s customer can easily move to a new provider but the CSP cannot easily move to new network infrastructure providers. The CSP is firmly risks being wedged.
Still wedded to the business model and closed supply chain of the 1900s, the Communications Service Provider cannot access the open market to reduce costs or develop new services. Capital and operational costs remain disproportionally high especially when compared with other tech-based service industries such as cloud and hyperscale internet providers. The tipping point has already been reached in highly competitive markets such as India where CSPs are disappearing from the market or are merging but still losing customers to competition. Despite the network itself becoming the foundation for the new global digital economy of the 21st century, the industry that provides the network is in crisis.
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Outline at&t as an example of a CSP that has been public about their strategic intent to harness open source … give examples of at&t open source initiatives and business impact>.
The value of Open Source is also not lost on the US Congress. <outline current proposal to fund open source for 5G to reduce technical hegemony>
US military research agency DARPA has stated its intention of establishing an open source program for 5G and US Congress is legislating to provide funding.