The telecommunications landscape has changed beyond all recognition in the past 20 years. In 1989, there was no Telkom - only two years later would it and the Post Office be born out of the old Department of Posts and Telecommunications.
Cellphones were still pretty much science fiction, there was no World Wide Web and a handful of renegade university computer scientists were experimenting with an amazing technology called e-mail. Telecommunications was a state monopoly and most people thought it would stay that way forever.
By 2009, this is hard to believe. Successive waves of technological innovation and deregulation created an explosion of diversity and an entirely new economic sector, supporting thousands of new businesses offering countless new products and services to consumers, small businesses and corporates alike.
The pendulum swing from tight control and minimal choice to massive diversity has introduced some problems of its own, along with all the benefits. Increased competition is great for consumers, but beyond a certain point an over-emphasis on price can cause quality to suffer. The quality problem is exacerbated by the fact that, with multiple providers offering multiple products and multiple levels of service, management becomes increasingly difficult and compatibility can`t always be guaranteed.
Telkom took a lot of the flak for these quality issues, not always fairly. The incumbent was an easy target, but often the real problems lay with sub-standard or incompatible equipment - or simply with the difficulty of co-ordinating services from multiple providers.
For organisations that value the reliability and quality of their communications infrastructure and services, the pendulum is starting to swing back the other way. Suddenly, having a single service provider is looking attractive again.
Technology is helping things along. For most of the past 15 or 20 years constant innovation has favoured specialists who were able to get and maintain the scarce skills they needed. Voice specialists were lost in the world of data and vice versa. Now, however, the convergence of multiple technologies is pretty much complete. Voice is just another kind of data and the corporate PBX is just another kind of router. A single service provider can provide a full menu of telecommunications services - and maintain the skills needed to make sure they`re of a high quality.
In this environment, choice of supplier is now more important than choice of technology. Over the next couple of years, we`re likely to see the emergence of a consolidated tier of network service providers acting as the interface between the backbone networks and end-customers. The service providers will specialise in creating products to suit customer needs, then aggregating traffic and passing it on to the most appropriate networks. The networks, in turn, will specialise in providing and maintaining the infrastructure to carry that traffic safely to its destination. One is the road-builder; the other is the logistics supplier.
The re-emergence of single service provider models marks the completion of this cycle of the ongoing information revolution. Provided there is a real choice among suppliers, which is what we now have, sourcing all communications from a single supplier offers real benefits to end-users.
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