Guy Daniels, TelecomTV (00:09):
Well, welcome back. Welcome to the final session of this year's DSP Leaders World Forum. This is the final session. You have one more hour with us. This is the session that nobody wants to miss. I can see you all rushing in, dashing to get your coffees dashing from the coffee cart. Dashing to the chairs and welcome back to our online audience as well. Thanks for sticking with us. No progress report for this session. No video, no DSP address. This is just pure 100% discussion. So our guests today, Ray, are all members of the DSP Leaders Council. Do you want to say a few words about this August Institution?

Ray Le Maistre, TelecomTV (00:48):
Yeah, no, absolutely guy. I do. We know quite a few folks in this industry and there are some we know we can turn to for answers to some of the big questions facing the industry. So we thought, well, why not pull them together and ask them regularly about important stuff and invite them to talk about it through our channels and events like this one, and also to help them gain insights from each other. So we set up the council last December. Now we have almost a hundred councilors and a fine bunch. They are too, as you can see. But in all seriousness, we're planning to do more with the council for the benefit of the members and the industry at large, but without asking anybody for a big chunk of anyone's time because we know how precious that is and we're very glad to have the support of these lovely people. So I thank the councilors.

Guy Daniels, TelecomTV (01:41):
Yeah, indeed. Absolutely. Thank you, Ray. Well, let's quickly introduce our guests. I'm sure you know 'em already, but for the benefit of our online audience as well, if I can ask our guests from our far left with Neil to introduce themselves.

Neil McRae, Juniper Networks (01:52):
Hi, I'm Neil McRae. I work at Juniper Networks.

Alexandra Foster, DSP Leaders Councillor (01:55):
Alexandra Foster, independent DSP Council.

Andrew Coward, IBM (01:58):
Good afternoon. Andrew Coward, general manager software networking at IBM,

Susan James, American Tower (02:03):
Susan James American Tower

Geoff Hollingworth, Rakuten Symphony (02:05):
And Geoff Hollingworth, Rakuten Symphony.

Guy Daniels, TelecomTV (02:07):
When I said briefly a few words, thank you very much everyone. We have spent, as Ray said, we've spent the past couple of days discussing how CSPs can change and accelerate that change to DSPs and open up new service opportunities, unleashing digital service opportunities. And we scrutinize this process in a lot of detail tell, but we want to kind of flip the conversation a bit here and approach it from the customer's perspective because we always tend to talk about the customers in the panel and not in great detail. So here's our opportunity to think. Actually this is all about the customer surely. And I like to start off because I know you've all got strong views on this, but I'd like to start off by asking you do you think, whether it's consumer business or enterprise, what do you think the customer wants from A DSP? Not what the DSP wants to give the customer, but what do you think the actual customer wants from these operators? Would like to start us off, Susan. Hey Susan,

Susan James, American Tower (03:10):
I want, let me make it very personal. I want an experience that solves my problems and whether that be multi household, whether it be multi people on the same plan, I have particular issues that are not being addressed today that I need solved from an enterprise perspective. I work with different family businesses and I can't navigate the website to find the solutions and I know reasonably what I'm talking about. So I can't imagine how enterprises managed to navigate this because the vast majority of them are not tech savvy enterprises. So I think we need to start to look at how do you take that customer journey and look at it. What is the problems that whether it be consumer or business have, what problem are they trying to solve when they turn to an operator? Because if they've got to that point, surely we must make it easy for them to be able to go and find what they're looking for in one packet rather than I need to buy this. Oh, Angie, then you need to have that and then you need to have that. Oh, but we can't put that all on the one bill because that's financed by so-and-so not my problem. That would be your problem.

Guy Daniels, TelecomTV (04:32):
Yeah, not your problem. You are the consumer. Shouldn't be your problem. Come on. I know we've got more thoughts about this. Jump in anyone. Sure.

Andrew Coward, IBM (04:40):
So I think obviously at IBM, we pride ourselves in spending a large amount of time with our enterprise customers and indeed bringing them to telcos to solve the connectivity part of the entire problem statement that we're solving for. I think there's a massive disconnect between the languages that telcos speak and the languages that enterprises speak. Like that's saying telcos are from Mars, enterprises are from Venus. It's kind of that level of disconnect. Enterprises want the application supporting to the earlier conversations. They want to be able to manage the latency of that, the security of those things. And they want to understand it in application language, not networking language. The answer to an application story isn't how much bandwidth would you like? It's how can I improve the uptime efficiency and service for this application that is strung out across a global infrastructure. That's the conversation that's not been had. And I can tell you almost in a therapy session, which this is now turning into, this is deeply frustrating that we cannot cross that threshold and have that level of conversation with enterprises about their needs mapped to what they understand and not what telcos understand. And if we were to solve that over the next few years next year, then that would be a massive shift in how the industry is understood by enterprises.

Alexandra Foster, DSP Leaders Councillor (06:02):
I think so often we talk about the D and the S as a digital service provider, but quite often for customers it actually stands for dire service and that is absolutely not what they need. It's great that after 48 hours of our conference here that we are ending with customers. If we think about the panels over the last two days, actually there were only two other panels were actually the word customer when it meant the end customer came up at all. And if we think about that word customer and we break it down as an acronym, well the C will stand for complexity. Actually. The customer wants all of that taken out. They want it to be net easy for them. So the C in customer is all about reducing complexity. The U in customer is about understanding. It's about understanding their business, not our business, their lens, what is it that their business needs us as an industry to do.

(07:15):
The S in customer can stand for security and it can certainly stand for sustainability. And both of those have to be implicit in absolutely everything that we deliver. The T is transparency. Transparency in terms of the communication about what we are delivering, when we're delivering, when we are changing it, and actually being really clear about the service, the pricing and the billing as well. The O in customer is around optimization, optimizing everything. That's that performance, that's that flexibility, the scalability, but then also optimizing an evergreening with the customer. They don't want to know that you're going to upgrade them to the next service. It just has to be implicit by design. M is management, it's our responsibility, not their responsibility to absolutely manage it. Well, letter have I missed out in customer C-U-S-T-O-E-R, we've got an E and an R and the e Andrew's already talked about edge. Edge is absolutely implicit for APIs and real time data, but it's also around that experience. And finally the R absolutely about reliability. So we is delivering digital services reli. So there you go, customer as an acronym.

Neil McRae, Juniper Networks (08:47):
Well done Alex. Just to build on that, I think the key thing that you mentioned I was going to say is our customers want us to walk in their shoes and actually even more so the customers are trying to leverage things on the network. So I'm a gamer. I love to play games and I was talking to Geoff about this earlier on, the biggest challenge, and if you take video off the network, the next biggest thing that consumes bandwidth is video games. It is a massive industry and people love to play games as the casual gamers, as the hardcore guys. But ultimately I work because of my gamer. I went and found out who runs Epics network. I'm a big Fortnite player and I said, Hey, what can we give you that would make a difference in actual play from your customers who are also our customers?

(09:48):
And we talked about APIs and AI earlier. They said actually what would be really helpful is if we could have an API on the home gateway so we can see what's going on and that's walking in their shoes. And actually what they do today is if you've got kids or a gamer like me, you'll see the first thing that Fortnite says, don't play on wifi because it's crap for the most part because we as service providers put out these 20 quid home gateways when actually we shouldn't be investing in that as a thing into the house. And actually many service providers have done that, but I still think there's more to do. But if you're able to give an API, and to some extent this is a bit depressing because this is what telemetry was all about. And we started working on telemetry with Google in 2013.

(10:41):
The whole point of it was to give a weather map. Here's what the network weather looks like and we've used it for loads of other things, but we haven't actually given that visibility to customers. So in my mind, customers are using the network, what are they using it for? Who's the other part in that network connection? How do we work with both of those and working this part of the network user who's a customer and this part of the network user who's a customer and how do we walk in their shoes to make that experience something that actually they don't think about the network, which pains me to say that, but when people aren't thinking about the network, that's when life is working for them. And we've got tons of, we're talking about all sorts of wacky APIs on fraud protection and stuff like that. Don't get me wrong, they're valuable. We've got so many simple things. If we just gave visibility to it, it would make a massive difference for customers.

Guy Daniels, TelecomTV (11:34):
Thanks Neil. Geoff, do you want to come in this one?

Geoff Hollingworth, Rakuten Symphony (11:37):
Yeah, so I'm going to gamble. I'm going to hope that my wife's not watching this. That's pretty safe bet. But my daughter is watching this, so I just want to speak out to her and say just what happens at telecom TV stays. At telecom tv. One of my coaching messages to people about successful relationships is to set the bar incredibly low because if you set the bar incredibly low to exceed that expectation is not that hard. Turning up just about makes people's day. The positive thing about our industry is expectations from customers are so low. It's unbelievable.

(12:31):
I just won a mobile operator or a telecom operator to just care about me slightly, just care about me slightly. And one of the most valuable customers they ever have. They've never even sent me one message or one phone call and just said, thank you. They don't care if their service works outside my front door, but I am surrounded by messages telling me that their 5G network is the best ever network on the planet and I'm in the industry and I don't care. It ties in to what we've all said, I think a little bit, and it is something that I'll give a call out to Chris, Chris Lewis about an interview he did at the Great Telco debate a couple of years ago with I think Philip Johnson, was it Jordan who used to work for Telefonica and now he was the CTIO for Sainsbury's.

(13:40):
He said, when you work for Sainsbury's, you wake up in the morning and you can taste the customer. If you can't taste the customer, they don't come in and buy things. They don't come in and buy things, you don't survive. And he said, customers to telco are an abstract concept and I think that's exactly how we treat customers. And I think if we could flip around and it is repeating everything that everybody said here, just try and understand the simple things that would help make the experience that we are providing slightly better and make us care, then I think you'll start to attach. So who started to rattle the cage a bit? In our industry over the last 10 years, the only company that changed slightly was T-Mobile, USA, nothing to do with technology. They made a very just very direct emotional promise and they said, we're going to just take the bullshit away. We're going to simplify it, we're going to uncarrier you. And they immediately have become just about the one telco in the world that's actually going into massive valuations, nothing to do with technology. It was trying to make a promise. And that promise, by the way, I don't think people really understood if that promise was delivered or not. They liked the idea of that promise because it spoke to them,

Guy Daniels, TelecomTV (15:02):
But yeah, they took the BS away and replaced it with another layer of bs, I guess. Well,

Geoff Hollingworth, Rakuten Symphony (15:06):
And that's what I mean, but let's go back to where I started. If you set the expectation really low BS that at least cares about you is better than bs, that doesn't maybe.

Guy Daniels, TelecomTV (15:17):
Well, yeah, and I was jotting some notes down at lunch and along your lines I was thinking, how do I get contacted by my service providers? My mobile provider contacts me if we only two things, one, I owe them money. Two, they want to send me something that I don't want. My full fiber provider contacts me for only two things. One, I owe them money, and two, they're about to plan a service disruption and I'm going to be offline for several hours and that's it. I don't get, how are you guy? I'd love one of those. Never had one in my life. Yeah,

Andrew Coward, IBM (15:47):
I told you this would turn into a therapy session.

Neil McRae, Juniper Networks (15:50):
I'm slightly nervous about sending out, Hey, how are you feeling today? We did that actually last place we did that in a survey was like, how are you generally feeling it? It became a bit of a laugh a minute. There was memes about it everywhere. But I think you're right about how do we treat customers as humans? But let me tell you, I'm going to focus on consumers for a minute because I think consumers are also people who work in business. So when they go into business, they kind of expect a behavior that they're used to from their own experience as consumers and they're so confused about what we sell, how we sell it, am I buying the right thing? And you go into 'em.

(16:36):
For the last year at Juniper, I've been traveling a while just trying to get a different perspective of having been 10 years in bt, is we all the same or someone doing something different? And across the world everybody's doing the same thing. You go and buy a sim and the experience is just, it's like filling your tank of petrol. No, how much do I need and what does this cost? And there's just very little in terms of, well, you watch Netflix every day, you probably need this. Or there's no thinking of actually what are you going to use our product for?

(17:12):
And then Geoff rightly says you set the expectation super low. I think I'm going to give credit to one company as well that I think has done a great job of improving it still work to do. But sky here in the uk, I've been a customer of sky's for I know 12 years and they do send me messages saying It's great to have you as a customer and did you know about this? And I really do think they've done a great job of turning customer centricity around. And by the way, sky own no network assets but are the number two network in mobile and fixed. Now I think in the UK that's pretty impressive. So it can be done, but I think there's more to do. But also I think the other thing we often do is customers expect telcos to give stuff away. We're going to give this away, we're going to give this away. And it creates an expectation of this is just stuff's just going to come. And actually I think we need to sometimes say, actually we're not going to do that.

(18:18):
Because quite often, and it's probably more on the business side, quite often there's a lot more expected than what's delivered, particularly if you go through a big procurement process. At least that's been my experience. And then again, being really clear and simple about what is this product and what does it do, what is it not going to do? But it goes back to I just think living in their shoes is crucially important. And I encourage you all this still sound weird, but going into one of the mobile phone shops and just watch for 20 minutes, it's insane. I go crazy. I know what I need to tell this guy, I want to tell him something. And then you've got some guy who's just like, Hey, I've got a target, I've got to hit the target. So I give that feedback. It's still email market bt, I was like I in one of your stores and heard this. Holy moly, he loves me for it, I'm sure. But if we don't believe it, I can tell you our customers in this industry aren't going to believe it.

Alexandra Foster, DSP Leaders Councillor (19:24):
There's quite a lot we can learn from other industries as well rather than being insular. If you have a look, I know you talked about retail and you look at what retail are doing in terms of loyalty cards and then using that data to find the intent behind the data. And there are some phenomenal startups out there who are using AI and data with the big retailers to be able to provide that insight to then be able to provide a personalized dialogue. And that personalized dialogue can be in the form of a personalized video. It can be a personalized email, it can be a personalized SMS. And I think that whether you look at pensions and insurance, actually again, they used to be in that realm of they might only talk to you once, but actually they've realized that you need to have a continual dialogue to be able to get that brand loyalty. And so I think there's quite a lot that we can learn from particularly retail and an awful lot from pensions and insurance as well.

Guy Daniels, TelecomTV (20:21):
Sure, sure. As Geoff said, and that video interview with Chris and Phil was absolute revelation and you can see it on telecom TV website if you go and find it, if you haven't seen it, it's well worth watching. Ray, should we move on because there's other ground we wanted to cover.

Ray Le Maistre, TelecomTV (20:34):
Yeah, absolutely. I just want to make one point just to follow up on a couple of things that were said there. You mentioned Sky Neil. I think in the uk, if you go back a little over 20 years and remember that Branson actually got into mobile in the uk, launched Virgin Mobile. It was an MVNO, they were on T-Mobile UK's network, and they got better scores for connectivity, reach, blah blah, blah. They were on better scores and it was the same network. Everything was the same except for the customer experience, but because the customer experience, because Branson invested in customer care teams, people thought the service was better than what they were the same service. And

Neil McRae, Juniper Networks (21:23):
That's still true today. Plus that in the UK it's exactly the same as bt. Exactly the same, yeah. They just have a different attitude when they talk to customers and it shows in retention, it shows in customer feedback, every metric they score better. Literally I built half of it. Every packet goes through the same thing. There is literally very almost no difference between

Ray Le Maistre, TelecomTV (21:48):
It. So maybe something to think about is just, and this is an ongoing every year, every decade, should service providers just be investing more in the support for their customers to give them a better experience. That might actually be a good, you might get a good return on investment in that. Just something to think about. But yeah, we do want to move on and go back and just come back to something that Andrew mentioned earlier, which is based on something that a question we got from the audience yesterday, which is about whether service providers really know how to properly communicate with their customers. And I particularly want to bring this into the enterprise realm here because there's a lot of instances where I think service providers, they talk about, oh, we spent time with this customer. We found out their needs. This customer, by the way, has a budget of about 25 million.

(22:45):
So of course they're going to spend time with 'em, find out what their needs and we delivered a package for them. Well that's great, you can do that for the big guns. But what about the thousands? No, the millions of businesses there are that need and everybody needs communication services. So what is the answer? We know that a good job is not being done to communicate with business users whether they're small, medium or even large. So what is the answer here? We heard from VM O2 yesterday, they're working with Accenture to get a better idea of what the enterprises need. But do we have any actual answers for how best to approach this enterprise challenge because this challenge has been going on for decades.

Andrew Coward, IBM (23:31):
It has. So a lot of the time we're spending with telcos in their, what I would call their managed services business to enterprises, large and small is what I would call the democratization of data, meaning the ability to show your customer how well each of their applications is actually performing, video conferencing, telecom, TV streams, all of the above, and provide that in a dashboard to answer the simple question, is it the network or is it the application that's having a problem right now? That's the number one thing that when and if you sit in a call center of a telco, by the way, which I've done for a few days, fascinating. The calls that come in, the questions that get asked, they all revolve around why isn't Instagram working or why can't I make a WebEx call? It's not, I mean obviously you get that my phone's broken, but from a business perspective, it's all about that application. So democratizing that information, providing our dashboard means that they won't need to call you, but they can get that data very quickly and very easily. A relatively simple step. The data's there, it's just not being used in a way that's helpful to customers.

Susan James, American Tower (24:44):
I think also that I don't think that they can do everything for everyone. So if you take that first premise and say, okay, they can't do everything for everyone, but surely again, you need to build an ecosystem of partners that you can then refer to that say, if you want to manage wifi network that's below this or whatever it is, here's a list of partners that you can actually collaborate with to support. I think again, looking at using the data, we were talking about AI yesterday and how it can be used and was all internally focused on the networks. Why don't we use some of those toolings to look at how are the customers using the network? What is the experience to start to understand how they use the networks? What is it that they're trying to do? And then start to build the products based on that.

(25:36):
What is that next step where they're going to need to say, okay, we can see that they're coming up to a break point. Maybe we should be proactive in saying, this looks like the next best thing for you, but also to work with partners that are going to be providing the applications. You're not going to buy that from your operator and give them that next step so that you're actually providing additional value in the chain. Building up more, a better experience on the network because it's not going to be the operator's network that's the problem. It's going to be their on-prem equipment, the wifi network that they've built there. But finding the right partners to work with for those enterprises is often very challenging.

Neil McRae, Juniper Networks (26:18):
I think with ai, we have no more excuses.

Susan James, American Tower (26:21):
I totally

Neil McRae, Juniper Networks (26:22):
Agree. So I mean, Andrew gave a great example, our MIS platform. Sir, I'm going to be a salesman for 10 seconds. Apologies. Our whole missed platform. We've been building AI into it for five years now. It'll detect why isn't something working and it'll just fix it. And I give an example, the largest supermarket chain in the world went from 10,000 tickets to a few hundred just by using AI in the network to all remediate, most of these problems are actually simple things. One of the biggest, cause we're out of IP addresses, DHCP, IP address, nothing works, right? And it's really simple effects and just allowing them to focus on what they do, which is sell their products rather than having to deal with network issues. And I just don't, in this world of the compute power that we've got of the cloud power that we've got, there are no more excuses for that.

(27:19):
And that's how we have to think about it. And we talked about mindset a lot. Again, I think that was more about how we work together. I think it's more about, hey, the champion here is the customer. Our mindset needs to be more focused on that. And I've got a low tolerance for it. As you guys know, when I've called out, hey, listened to this presentation for 40 minutes and you said customer at 39 minutes, I just don't think, and I think that's what Phil Jordan meant, I just don't think we can have that sort of behavior. And I kind of challenge our industry, which is, and that's something that I've been pushing in my organization. We sell to telcos, but that's not the customer, it's their customer. How do we get more insight into what they're actually using, what we sell to them for?

(28:09):
And actually a big part of that is networks for AI right now where we're building out tons of big huge platforms to support the GPU needs that are coming and we're trying to figure out, okay, what's the best way of doing this? And that's very much like, okay, what are you going to use this for? And again, walking in their shoes, but I just don't, we're going to have these excuses anymore. It just doesn't make any sense in the world that we live in now for us to have those excuses. It feels like the train companies

Ray Le Maistre, TelecomTV (28:41):
Should certain terms be banned. If you're going to talk,

Neil McRae, Juniper Networks (28:45):
I would ban the word use case. All I've heard is use case. Use case, destroy the industry. No, don't talk about the word use case. Talk about the thing that you did for God's sake. Some of these things are amazing. The example that from Liberty gave up about the boats that was phenomenal and everything we consume or do comes on a boat at some point in time. So for me, we need to talk more about that because people, I remember saying the word use case on a call in front of my grandkids and they were like, use case granddad. What's that? I'm like, you don't want to know. Keep playing Roblox. No, I just talk about the thing and I think, Geoff, you said this as well, what is the thing that we're doing? We're so far away from that and that it drives me nuts basically. I've heard the use case just so many times. I want to talk about, here's the thing we did, we made a boat go faster. We enabled some family to speak to their cousin that they hadn't speak to a hundred year, whatever it is. Talk about that thing because the thing that will inspire folks to actually want to work with us,

Alexandra Foster, DSP Leaders Councillor (29:58):
Well that's absolutely about understanding the customer's business and it's solving their problem. And I think that more often than not, our industry gets locked into speaking with one persona or a type of persona at an organization, but actually to be able to solve those problems, actually you need to be able to speak to a suite of people across an organization. And I think there's a blurring of the roles as well and your traditional CIO, well actually they're also having afoot in the CMOs world. They're also having a foot in the COO's world and having a foot in the CCROs world. So actually your conversation isn't just with one. You have to, in order to understand the business problem of that organization, you have to be able to have a conversation with all of those personas to be able to really get deeply into it. You talked about boats and the previous boat example in a former life, absolutely speaking to one of the ports, they had a big problem about containers coming in actually by putting in 5G, being able to put in computer vision, actually looking at whether a container was damaged or not coming in looking at those assets then started to help save them money because they were able to prove that actually it wasn't them that was denting it, it was the previous port that had done it and that had absolutely the conversation, oh, look at that marvelous connectivity.

(31:36):
It wasn't that at all. It was actually, look at that. You're saving us 50 grand a month.

Geoff Hollingworth, Rakuten Symphony (31:41):
So let me

Alexandra Foster, DSP Leaders Councillor (31:42):
The story.

Geoff Hollingworth, Rakuten Symphony (31:44):
I've disclosed my personal relationships, so let me disclose my professional.

Alexandra Foster, DSP Leaders Councillor (31:50):
Do we need a health warning again on this one?

Geoff Hollingworth, Rakuten Symphony (31:53):
Did you need a health warning? The first one was

Alexandra Foster, DSP Leaders Councillor (31:57):
You gave the caveat

Geoff Hollingworth, Rakuten Symphony (31:58):
Up, it makes you feel better probably about the relationship you are with. I work for a guy Mickey mic. He's not a telecom guy. He's literally like working with someone who's like Ian Musk, Elon Musk, sorry, of Japan. He's involved in every decision we take from a business point of view, every business decision. He runs 70 businesses online in Japan. He's the digital services leader. 13% of Japanese GDP flows through his digital, he's unleashed the digital services opportunity. You can have that if you want. I'm going to get T-shirts of, yeah, we were laughing last night, so I said I was going to go home and speak to my wife. She said, what do you do? I said, I went to, we spoke about unleashing telecom and it was anyway different.

(33:04):
Mickey didn't join telecom to do telecom. Mickey joined telecom to integrate telecom into everyone's lives and the 360 degree journey. Mickey runs the biggest rewards program, membership loyalty program. So all of the telecom approach, if I was interested in learning more about what Rakuten was doing, I'd learn more about actually Rakuten Mobile and its commercial models. And its commercial changes because it's integrating how people use phones into them, traveling on holidays into them booking into their banking, shopping, shopping. So Rakuten has 650,000 small to medium businesses that are customers of their, they run their shops for them. We're looking at how we can integrate communications into their online shopping experience. So then customer support is a clickable link that is automatically transcribed, maybe applied, managed. It's not hard. Now if you then go out to those 650,000, I have a massive, so one I'll tie into a concern I have about customers in the industry.

(34:23):
I think we take our customers for granted, they've always been there. What we aren't seeing is an undercurrent starting around the introduction of EIM that allows you to change carrier tremendously, easily and quickly. In Japan, we are a hundred percent eim. So we put links in all of our online services that says, do you want to use us as your mobile subscriber, mobile service? You click it and you literally move over because we've got your details. You're a banking customer, we know who you are, we know your credit rating, we've got everything. So I think we have, there's a bigger risk in our conversations here that I've seen in the cable industry where you take your existing customers for granted so desperate to get those other customers and you wake up one morning and other people know how valuable the customers you had actually are and they've taken them and they were undercurrents of that happening.

(35:29):
I mean I've ditched the big carriers in the us, I'm tired of them. I'm using an MVNO and that MVNO is excellent. They run on Verizon. My bill went from $70 to 15. Wow. And the service is better and I love them. And do you know what they've got on their store? They sell me T-shirts and caps. They're merchandising me at the same time. It's everything that we are not doing. We're too busy getting excited about a quality on demand API that the won't work in the room we're in because we've stated we can't get coverage here, unfortunately we're a bit too low. That's not

Susan James, American Tower (36:19):
True, Geoff. I have coverage.

Geoff Hollingworth, Rakuten Symphony (36:21):
Oh, you

Susan James, American Tower (36:21):
Have coverage.

Geoff Hollingworth, Rakuten Symphony (36:23):
Anyway, that's your

Neil McRae, Juniper Networks (36:25):
MO provider. Sorry, that's your MVO provider. I've got,

Geoff Hollingworth, Rakuten Symphony (36:32):
I think the one message I'd give is actually look at what Rakuten's doing from the customer relationship. They didn't join this from a technology point of view. They actually joined it from, they understood the value of the data and the integration of the experience. And you don't have to own all those other properties because once you understand how to integrate, you can actually partner in a much healthier way. It's not just the sponsorship, it's now actually materially affecting business.

Susan James, American Tower (36:59):
But it is coming back to that simplification and communication as well and making things easy. And I said it yesterday, when you go in and look at the services that are provided on everything is about the different plans that you can buy for your mobile phone. And then if you keep looking and keep looking and then keep looking, then you'll find something else. And then it's things like do you want SD one? And I mean nobody knows if they want SD one or not because they don't know what SD one is. Instead of saying what is it that you're looking for? You have a connectivity issue. You want to provide connectivity to your customers or understanding those things and simplifying it into language that people that aren't in the industry can understand. So I think one of the nice things about going to American Tower is that I work with lawyers and I work with accountants. So working in the technology organization for me is like how do I translate this into a way that anyone in the room can actually understand? And I think been one of the blessings of my journey, if you like in telecommunications. I've spent half my time translating technical speak into layman's terms so people can understand what it is that we're actually trying to do. And I think just something that simple is going to be a good start.

Andrew Coward, IBM (38:26):
So I've had a similar experience with IBM actually I think it's fascinating to run a network division inside IBM for a company that doesn't care about networks in their everyday existence and to speak in language that the broader IBM sales and consulting teams can understand. So my reeducation, which is three and a half years into my journey so far, has been to speak app talk and not network talk when I open my mouth. And that has just completely shifted how we as a network group inside IBM are perceived by our colleagues and about the inclusion we then get in all the business that we do. Is that fundamental?

Guy Daniels, TelecomTV (39:08):
Thanks everyone. Ray, should we see what our audience think at this stage? Are there any questions from our audience based on what you've been hearing? Oh God, I can't see. I think, oh yeah, right in the front. The microphone is coming your way. Robert,

Robert Curran, Appledore Research (39:24):
Excellent panel. Good to talk about customers and great insights from everybody. I wonder do you feel that we are, I know the term can be slightly overused, but at a point of inflection in how we think about what enables the next stage of growth because growth is really what tugs want. We're flat to down in the industry and I think we've internalized the idea that the next G is no longer the answer. We've talked about a few things. Orchestration automation seems to be pretty key. The concept of programmability, the idea that change doesn't have to cost a lot and if change doesn't cost a lot, then you can change and experiment a lot as well. That's a really new set of attitudes and I think reference points for telecom as an industry. I wonder whether, again across the panel you think that adds up to something that we are as an industry morphing, we're taking that on board or do you think in the sort of boardrooms that you guys are in on a routine basis, can you just do the same as last year but cost 5% less?

Susan James, American Tower (40:35):
I am quite optimistic. I think there is still a lot of latent demand in the enterprise or middle prize market for solutions to the problems that they have today that will require good connectivity. When you look at the in-building coverage, when you start building out c-band or the higher capacity 5G, it doesn't penetrate well into buildings and they will require some kind of solution in building and I think the companies that are positioned to best to do that are going to be the operators. And I think we start to see the signs, whether that be private networks, whether it be in building coverage of the macro network indoors. There are many different technologies that you can solve that with. You're not locked into one. So I think again, addressing that in a way that solves that problem and then applying the right technology underneath that is something that the operators are in the best place to do.

(41:41):
But again, you're going to need to work with an ecosystem of players to do that because those enterprises are willing to pay those problems now you just need to find the right channel to get to them. So whether you go via a systems integrator or whether you go via your operator, I do think there's a lot out there and you start to see this happening. Verizon's made announcements about private 5G in combination with indoor coverage and they're taking a small business approach within Verizon to address that. You start to see it in many operators around the world. So I do think that they're waking up and actually moving in that direction. I just hope that they are able to build those communities and actually take those next steps because there is a big demand there. When you look at particularly enterprises that need to provide good network coverage, whether it be hotels like this, whether it be resorts, those businesses rely on good connectivity because if they do not have it, their customers will not stay and they will complain on TripAdvisor or Google reviews and people won't stay there. So it really impacts their business. Poor connectivity really impacts their business.

Neil McRae, Juniper Networks (43:03):
Absolutely. I think there's another point in the developed network world as I like to call it, we're almost at a point where we've got more capacity than demand. So if you look at some of the European countries, traffic growth was at least three European countries where traffic growth was around about 10% and only four or five years ago it was 30%. So on that 10%, if growth is 10%, what does that mean for us in terms of how we monetize the network today, which is typically based on price plans or speeds, right? I think this is a potentially really big opportunity for the industry to pivot away from the speed thing and actually focus on quality reliability and coverage again, which I think are more important to customers than speed, especially mobile customers. And I think it requires much than the same way with enterprises.

(44:02):
I think it requires telcos to have a different conversation about how they build infrastructure in places. How do they cope with seasonal changes of traffic where building a macro site for six months of the year doesn't make any sense? How do they expand beyond their normal method of thinking such that they're able to provide that connectivity where you are? Six G for me should be about one thing, constant connectivity. Forget everything else because if we get constant connectivity, all the other stuff that we've on about in 4G and 5G, it will happen because people will be able to rely upon a platform that's there in the car park at the airport, in the venue, in the hotel that's two stories down. They will rely upon it and that will drive a whole set of new capabilities that people want to use. And I think that last kind of four or 5% lack of connectivity is the barrier for telecom's companies to take the next step and make their customers, and I'm going to use a word that I hate to use, but it is important, become more dependent upon the network so they will put more things onto it.

(45:18):
There's so many we've heard it where, well I need two clouds. No you don't. And actually the risk of having two clouds is greater. You're swinging from one to the other is greater than one going down would be my sense. But how do we really make the network truly available everywhere we go? Someone mentioned that telecom industry 10 points down and I get where they're coming from, but this is part of the telecom industry and there's no way this is 10 points down, but there's all this, we've come absolutely focused on making this thing work. There's so many other telecommunications needs that if we step beyond it and think about those needs and put them in place, people will depend upon the network even more and be willing to spend even more. And I think that's what we've missed for the last probably 5, 6, 7 years.

Andrew Coward, IBM (46:15):
I'll give really interesting example of that. I talked about quick serve fast food restaurants earlier in every fast food restaurant in America today is a server. The reason that server's there is because they don't trust the network. Meaning that if you walk in and you want to order a burger and the network's not there, you don't get your food so you go somewhere else. We have to solve that

Neil McRae, Juniper Networks (46:43):
A hundred percent. Again, in this day and age, why don't we have network everywhere? We've got some great stuff coming with satellite, but I don't think it's good enough. We need to make it better than that. And I think getting to a world where our carriers are able to interact with each other to provide that coverage at a cost or in a trading way like we used to do with telephone numbers. Hey, we don't have a route to this. Have you got a route to it? How do we get to that sort of world? I think there's a need and a demand for it. I think I look at my grandson Theo, when his iPad doesn't work, he's like, what is this world? Can you right? It's incredible when it's like Granddad, why doesn't it work? We're on the M four.

Geoff Hollingworth, Rakuten Symphony (47:38):
How does he know it's your fault?

Neil McRae, Juniper Networks (47:41):
He knows that I can fix things.

Guy Daniels, TelecomTV (47:46):
Right. Great. Thanks everyone. Hey Ray, this has been like a point and shoot panel, hasn't it? Question from Chris. It's like click and go. Oh, Chris, Chris, Chris, we've got a comment there because we're going to bring the microphone. It's coming right up to you now.

Chris Lewis, Lewis Insight (48:01):
Can I have a quick one?

Guy Daniels, TelecomTV (48:03):
Yeah, go on then we'll slot you in. So

Chris Lewis, Lewis Insight (48:04):
It does occur to me and it actually, Andrew, your comment triggered this in my mind to remind me to ask the question that in the future will the connectivity not be embedded in other things and we won't even talk about it and therefore we will pay for it through other means whether we're purchasing applications, purchasing content and other things. Because frankly that's what we all expect. We'll expect the connectivity to be there. So will telecoms not become much more wholesale and we will become more distant as an industry from the actual customers.

Guy Daniels, TelecomTV (48:32):
Thank you. Thank you Chris. Quick comments for Chris. So

Geoff Hollingworth, Rakuten Symphony (48:35):
Revolut has already started that. So Revolut the payments app now they sell you an eem, they zero rate all their traffic globally and you get a very low connectivity if you're on holiday somewhere else. So they solved the problem but people weren't using Revolut when they weren't on their home network. So it becomes really interesting. So that connectivity has the technical ability to disappear into an app experience now then you get of course what does that really mean and how does that work? But that's what's happening underneath the scenes and those app people are the ones that are innovating around that.

Neil McRae, Juniper Networks (49:14):
And I think we'll get devices shout out, Hey, I need connectivity. Who's there to trade with me? It's probably way in the future, but you just imagine, hey, I've got no connectivity here, a ping and then someone says, Hey, I've got connectivity, I'll trade that with you. And what's the value of this transaction that you're trying to do? Because I think trying to solve this with these dishes and things put on walls, we're not going to solve it that way. It's just not possible. But there are other ways of more peer to PR or device to device to solve those connectivity things like the light system in here has got connectivity. Hey, I need connectivity. Light system just does it. That's the probably seven, 10 G or wherever it is. But I believe that's where I think we'll have to get to if we really want this to work in the way that it's always on and always there

Geoff Hollingworth, Rakuten Symphony (50:01):
And I don't understand. So just on that revolu, I'd love to know this, if they like reverse auction, who they connect to underneath. I haven't really looked at how they managed then their productivity costs. But you can see then if we thought we were disaggregated or disintermediated from the experience before, now we're going three levels down as an industry.

Neil McRae, Juniper Networks (50:21):
Kindle's had that for years,

Guy Daniels, TelecomTV (50:24):
Guy. That's where we've got to

Alexandra Foster, DSP Leaders Councillor (50:27):
Regain the single pane of glass and be the super app. You've talked about the super amplification of Rakuten and everything that you've done in Japan. You've seen exactly the same thing in China with something that started out as chat in terms of WeChat. Well, it's a pervasive super app that you can do anything on from banking and shopping to everything else. And actually we haven't really outside of those countries necessarily as an industry gained that super app status. And if we don't do that ourselves, then actually somebody else will come in and we will all be disaggregated because somebody else will be the aggregator. Well,

Ray Le Maistre, TelecomTV (51:08):
Let's see what the results of the polls say because personalized services I think was one of the options, wasn't it For a minute there guy, I thought we were going to end this event with a reference to 10 G, which have made my

Guy Daniels, TelecomTV (51:20):
I was shocked. This is the first official reference to 10 G and its associated use case. Thank you for that.

Neil McRae, Juniper Networks (51:27):
We'll get the merch out to you soon guys. Just say no to 10 G.

Guy Daniels, TelecomTV (51:32):
Talking to the poll, right?

Ray Le Maistre, TelecomTV (51:34):
Yes. So it's time to look at the final poll results and the question we asked, what is the best way for a digital service provider to increase customer satisfaction? Let's see what the results are showing. Look. Okay, I can't believe that. What I'm shocked as everybody that's voted got loads of money anyway. We've got simplified customer engagement. We talked about that 44% and that more personalized service that you want Susan and that we've just talked about there. Are you the 14% there? Is that your vote

Guy Daniels, TelecomTV (52:08):
Eight different browsers to vote

Ray Le Maistre, TelecomTV (52:09):
For that? That's right. Yeah, absolutely. But that's interesting. So it just goes to show or this suggest. Suggest makes more optimistic, suggest you don't have to lower prices to get or keep customers, make them happy.

Neil McRae, Juniper Networks (52:22):
That's the untapped potential that Susan talked about

Ray Le Maistre, TelecomTV (52:25):
That graph. Absolutely, a hundred percent. So there

Guy Daniels, TelecomTV (52:29):
We go.

Susan James, American Tower (52:30):
Are we up to numbers five now instead of number four?

Guy Daniels, TelecomTV (52:37):
Right. Well that is the end of session eight then. Thank you all very much. It's almost the end of DSP leaders will forum for another year. But before we thank our guests, we have a few final announcements to do. We've got to say a huge thank you to all of our sponsors. We've said this before and we'll say it again. Your support is invaluable. We will not be here without you and thank you to all the attendees whether in person. Fantastic. Thanks for coming along. I hope you've got a lot of networking and all those watching online. I hope you all enjoyed the event from wherever you're watching from and in fact, I have just heard that we are on track to report over 2000 online viewers for this event. So we are delighted by that. That's up on last year. We heard a lot of expert industry speakers here on the main stage, also over in the extra short cafe. Thanks so much for sharing all your insights and expertise. Thank you to the whole crew here and telecom TV team. A lot of work is done behind the scenes. You don't see it. So thank you very much.

(53:41):
You all make us look fantastic, so that's great. What an achievement. Next up, we are going to resume our online summit series in September with a cloud native telco and we are back live and in person in London and with Chris Varney in early December for the annual great Telco debate book. Now to avoid disappointment please, meanwhile, Ray and the team are going to be pouring over all of those two days of videos, aren't you? And analyzing the discussions on telecom tv. It's going to

Ray Le Maistre, TelecomTV (54:09):
Relive it,

Guy Daniels, TelecomTV (54:09):
Relive it, relive it. It's going to be a wonderful weekend for the family. If you missed anything, you can catch up on everything online. Just as soon as we get all the panels up. I think half of 'em are already up. Actually they're all going to be made available as soon as we get them processed. One more thing, because we started this event with a little silly exercise to see where we thought we were on the scale of, well it was a DSP reality check, I think we called it. We had where we had fantasy towers at the end, number 10 where we all aspire to be and we had sort of abject doom and gloom with Martin on the other end and we marked the floor where the audience said we were. There's two tapes because we couldn't agree on where we were

Ray Le Maistre, TelecomTV (54:51):
With three and a half I think is where we

Guy Daniels, TelecomTV (54:53):
Were. Let's have a look at that. Three and a half. Three and a half. Three and a half. So what we will like to do is after two days of discussion, where do you think we are now on a scale of not to 10, not being this little black box here and 10 being the black box over there. Where do you think we are? Are we still kind of hovering in the middle?

Ray Le Maistre, TelecomTV (55:11):
Right? I'm going to take the black tape go on. Then I need people to tell me whether I need to move to my left or to my right. Am I going to 10 or zero? Come on, let's hear some shouts.

Guy Daniels, TelecomTV (55:23):
Four,

Ray Le Maistre, TelecomTV (55:24):
Three. Three.

Susan James, American Tower (55:26):
No, really three.

Ray Le Maistre, TelecomTV (55:29):
Are we going down? Is this it? Are we getting more despondent after two days? We're getting more towards each.

Guy Daniels, TelecomTV (55:34):
Ten six. I'm already

Ray Le Maistre, TelecomTV (55:39):
Spinal tap. That's right, you were at 11. Okay. I'm getting more calls to go to this end of the scale to be okay. I've been told we're going to stop here. Look, this is where the other tab was. We're going to call it seven out of 10. I think the Negroni and the martinis are still coursing through the veins from last night and are leading to an optimistic outlook. Not as optimistic as Neil's, but so

Guy Daniels, TelecomTV (56:03):
We have raised the hopes of the industry, have we? Of those two

Ray Le Maistre, TelecomTV (56:06):
Days? I think we have.

Guy Daniels, TelecomTV (56:10):
Great, great, great. Well look, Ray and I are about to go off and do a final extra shot. That is it. We will see you all next year hopefully for next year's DSP Leaders World Forum. We'll let you know all the details later online. And that is it. Until then, please, please, please thank our guests. We've got a great selection on stage. We've had a load over the two days. But thank you all very much indeed and thank you all for attending.