Are Cellphone Carriers Like Gas Stations?

from the Liger-In-Your-Tank dept

It's a simple lesson from Kindergarten: Share. You probably don't think of oil companies as being particularly good at this - except perhaps in the sense of sharing oil price hikes at the pumps - but it turns out they have another hidden sharing skill that they'd rather you didn't see. They share gas and pipelines, run by pipleline firms called "common carriers". Although not widely known, there is very little difference between the gas you buy at competing fuel stations in the US. The gas is a commodity product based on quality specs, and the differences are mostly marketing.

The privately-owned national gas/oil distribution infrastructure is quite formidable (offering a massive legacy advantage over any future fuels). There are pipelines that cross the country, refineries, trucks, equipment, tanks, catchments, reserves - all to deliver fuel to a growing economy (yes, growing...over the long-term at least).

But it would be prohibitively expensive to build such an infrastructure for EACH of the gas station brands. So instead of separate pipelines snaking the country, one each for Chevron, Shell, Texaco, Philips, etc...they share. Tanker ships deliver a standard grade of oil to refineries where it is refined to standard grades of fuel. And while the refineries may be owned by a specific oil company, the fuel they produce is put in common pipes to transport across the nation. Thus, the premium gas that Shell puts in the pipe in California could be taken out by Texaco in Nevada. Since it is a commodity product, it doesn't matter whose batch of fuel is taken out of the pipe, it only matters how much. This pipe is quite "dumb", but the network is shared, and the commodity that is transported is a standard package - sound familiar to any telco people?

The Fair Trade Commission in the US has stopped gas companies from making false advertising claims, and if the companies are selling the same gas, they can't claim it to be better. Thus claims like "More powerful" get replaced with the metaphorical, nonsensical "Put a tiger in your tank!" Is shared infrastructure and a standards-based product killing the gas companies? No. How do they compete if the product they sell is EXACTLY the same as their competition? What's the value of brand?

The answer lies in a small trick. The FTC won't allow them to say their gas is better if it's the same. But if they inject some small amount of "additive" just before selling the gas to customers (This additive can be anything...even a secret formula of 11 herbs and spices) that's all it takes to claim a different product. And with a different product, the gas companies can claim to have a "cleaner running" product, or "burns better" or whatever angle they want to promote with their brand. It works. They have been sharing pipes for decades, so maybe their case is instructive for telcos.

There IS money to be saved from sharing a single infrastructure. Especially when the product is standards-based. GSM, EDGE, 3G, HSPA, LTE are all pretty standard. As are Metro Ethernet, IP backhaul, etc. So I believe the carriers are on to a good idea in reducing their CapEx by sharing common network elements. Even more so because of the frequent 2G-3G-4G-... upgrades needed to compete. They can easily continue to differentiate by offering special "additives" to their product.

And while the gas companies' additives are mostly snake oil. The telecom "additives" are quite important, and can truly differentiate a mobile subscription over the raw bits inside the dumb pipe: Customer service, retail presence, data services, location platforms, fixed/mobile integration, easy-to-read bills, the iPhone, fave-5, rollover minutes...these are all very important parts of the service mix, and are true differentiators about which customers care. The things that subscribers don't care about might as well be shared. Amazon.com and buy.com both ship with UPS - do you care that they share the delivery mechanism?

Sol Trujillo, outgoing CEO at Australian cellco Telstra, is making the opposite gamble, detailed in a speech at MWC. He thinks the differentiator is the network infrastructure, and is piling money into it to be the first carrier to offer high-speed LTE technology, contrasting his approach to the common-carrier approach of Telfonica and Vodafone. While LTE is great, thinking that the network is a differentiator is wrong, and shortsighted. No customer has ever cared about the technology or the infrastructure. And while Telstra invests in a brief technology lead with LTE, their higher costs of upgrades may eventually make them technology laggards compared to competitors that share.

I can see it now: "Cleaner burning Vodafone Wireless", or "AT&T. Put an Apple in your tank!"

Derek Kerton is an expert at the Insight Community. To get insight and analysis from Derek Kerton and other experts on challenges your company faces, click here.

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Supreme Court To Investigate If AT&T Is Violating Antitrust Laws With Wholesale DSL Pricing

from the competition? dept

In most cases, antitrust rules seem fairly bogus. They often are used to try to punish companies for being successful, even if they're not actually abusing any kind of monopoly situation. However, there are some cases where antitrust laws become a lot more interesting, when it comes to governments effectively granting monopoly rights to certain companies. That's what's happened with many telco services, where the government has basically provided monopoly "rights of way" to certain companies to put down infrastructure in places that no other company can. These rights of way were supposed to come with "common carrier" status, that would require the provider to allow equal access, without discrimination, even to companies that might "compete" in some manner or another with the core infrastructure provider. A few years back, however, the FCC made sure to classify broadband services as information services rather than telco services -- even if they were using the same infrastructure. This was great for the telcos, since information services weren't subject to common carrier restrictions like telco services were.

Yet, those broadband services still benefited from those rights of way, and they used their new found lack of restrictions to raise wholesale prices to smaller ISPs who offered services on their networks. A series of lawsuits followed, including an appeals court ruling that found that AT&T was abusing monopoly rights to offer prices that were simply out of line with market pricing -- making it effectively impossible for any other provider to compete. AT&T has appealed and now the Supreme Court has agreed to hear the case. This could be very important, as it could force a company like AT&T, which relies on these government granted rights of way, to offer up access to their network to potential competitors who could offer more reasonably priced services. This also could have a major impact on both the overall competitiveness of broadband in the US as well as network neutrality -- since having more competition would make it harder for AT&T and others to violate net neutrality.

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