Please give your opinion on the following statements. After you have completed the questionnaire and clicked on the 'register responses' button your visions will appear in red while those of the experts will be in blue.
Statement 1. In the competition between incumbents (such as BT and AT&T) and new facilities-based operators (such as COLT and MCI WorldCom) the latter will come to dominate the industry.
Statement 2. Within the next few years there will be a glut in telecoms capacity leading to both a fall in the price of capacity and a fall in the total revenue of all network operators combined (although individual operators may be competitive enough to increase their revenue).
Statement 3. Because the specialist technology suppliers supply the latest technologies to all telecoms companies, the latter find it difficult to differentiate their services from those of their rivals.
Statement 4. New telecoms companies will need to develop in-house R&D capabilities to survive in the longer run. (At present, while the 'big five' incumbents spend on average 2.5 per cent of their sales on R&D, the new telecoms companies spend virtually nothing, outsourcing their R&D needs to specialist technology suppliers.)
Statement 5. Although at present there are many competing local access technologies, technical change will mean that soon only one or two of them will survive. (Competing local access technologies include optical fibre, cable, cellular mobile, fixed radio access, DSL, satellite and lines running through electricity cables.)
Statement 6. The telecoms industry will become vertically specialised like the computer industry with different players specialising in the various layers of the industry.
Statement 7. Within the next few years capital markets, including stock exchanges, will significantly decrease their enthusiasm for telecoms companies.
Statement 8. The incumbent telecoms companies will loosen the current tight integration between their divisions and segment themselves into a family of largely autonomous businesses with headquarters retaining only ultimate financial control and the overall direction of company strategy.
Statement 9. The network layer of the global telecoms industry will become dominated by only a handful of global network operators.
Statement 10. There will be a massive shakeout in the global telecoms industry with the number of network operators competing falling to below 10 per cent of the peak number.
Statement 11. The specialist facilities-less service providers, who depend on the networks of others, will be at a significant disadvantage when they compete in the same services markets with network operators.
Statement 12. Specialist technology suppliers (like Lucent, Nortel and Cisco) will construct their own networks and compete in network services markets with the other network operators while at the same time selling equipment to them.
Statement 13. IT companies (like Microsoft, IBM and Intel) will increasingly compete directly with telecoms companies.
Statement 14. The role of telecoms companies in e-commerce will be confined primarily to the provision of internet infrastructure (including intranets and extranets) and web-hosting.
Statement 15. A superior understanding of the problems and needs of specific customer segments is the most important determinant of competitiveness in the telecoms industry.
Statement 16a. The most globally aggressive new fixed operators are from the US because the US is better at producing entrepreneurs than other countries.
Statement 16b. The most globally aggressive new operators are from the US because their capital markets provide better support than their counterparts in other countries.
Statement 17. The single best measure of the performance of telecoms operators is growth in sales.
Statement 18. Mobile operators and service providers will become significantly more important than fixed operators and service providers.
