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The great irony here is that the traditional networks that are the foundation of the Communications Service Provider business can in fact 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. The underlying proprietary network technologies 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 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 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. This creates the challenge for the CSP's business model and the CSP risks being wedged. 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 crisisfacing significant challenges.
How then does the communications industry, both move to the open model of innovation, development and collaboration enjoyed by other technology-based industries? Enter Open Source. <Describe Open Source movement and benefits to companies and industries. Give Linux as an example and refer to others eg databases.>
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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>.
While there are benefits from using open source, the benefits are greater to those who also contribute to open source. This is because "Companies that contribute and give back learn how to better use the open source software in their own environment." Source: Harvard Business Review: Firms that contribute to Open Source capture up to 100% more productive value from Open Source Software than their free-riding peers.https://hbswk.hbs.edu/item/the-hidden-benefit-of-giving-back-to-open-source-software
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.
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