¿"Containerisation" en las Telcos?

La entrada es de Telco 2.0 y discurre con objetividad a través de la analogía que sugiere la última gran ola de innovación en el transporte marítimo (el uso y la adopción mundial de los contenedores, que alteró para siempre 1) el diseño de los barcos, 2) el diseño de los puertos y 3) el modelo de negocio de los transportadores), y un futuro que cabría esperar para las Telcos, que muestra signos ya hoy de hallarse en despliegue

Extracto 1, el asunto:

"We’ve quite frequently referred to shipping containers and containerisation on this blog as a useful parallel to trends in the telco industry, especially the importance of big-scale IT, personalised and integrated logistics services, the relative weakness of systems based on deep packet inspection, and the vital importance of standards..."

Extracto 2, el cambio, cuando finalmente ocurrió, en el ecosistema:

"The impact of the new business model was both huge and swift. Ocean freight rates and shipping line profit margins crashed. Transport was commoditised and the combination of low margins, large capital requirements and increasing network returns to scale meant the shipping industry rapidly consolidated. Network topology became less diverse, ships went where the traffic was and a new breed of super-ports was created. These were strategically located in terms of sea and railway traffic, but divorced from industry and dominated by scale, so-called load centres..."

Extracto 3, el efecto, positivo, en los clientes finales:

"On the other hand, containerisation had the inverse effect on the transport industry’s customers. While it commoditised shipping lines, it individualised shipping and made it possible to ship single loads to individual customers at bulk cargo prices with one single payment and one waybill. The net effect was a reduction in the barriers to entry for international trade. In 1998, it was estimated that 60% of the containers transiting the Port of Los Angeles contained intermediate goods on their way to other businesses. If containerisation is an analogy to telecoms, the types of companies we can expect to see will have big bit pipes and processing centres, or will be logistics firms that provide individualised services..."

Extracto 4, la advertencia para las Telcos:

"Further, to take off, containerisation required a change in pricing. Previously, shipping lines charged different rates for different goods. They tried to maintain this with containers, but with freight sealed in a container it was impossible to discover the nature of the goods without opening and searching through the container. Telco companies call this deep packet inspection.

The shipping lines were organised in so-called conferences that fixed prices and terms on individual routes. These cartels tried to enforce container stripping and stuffing, but new entrants undercut them and their own members eventually cheated. On the docks, nobody has stripped and stuffed containers in the past 30 years. If there is a lesson to be learnt here it is that price discrimination among traffic types does not work."