Embrace video or lose customers - Huawei

The intelligent world is here, and telcos need to be ready for it. That’s the message from Huawei during the opening keynote at Broadband World Forum in London this morning.

During his session, XiPeng Xiao from the CTIO office of Huawei Western Europe said future products, services and consumer attitudes aren’t necessarily being saved for whenever the future arrives. XiPeng says the future is already here, and it is changing both B2B and B2C network requirements, starting with how IoT is impacting society and, specifically, telcos.

“The network isn’t just connecting people but it’s now connecting things,” he said. “When things are connected by the internet we are becoming smarter and better informed. The Internet is making people smarter, and similarly will make things smarter and the whole world smarter.

“Previously, phones were not smart, now they. Cars could not drive themselves, but now they can. The world is becoming intelligent, and all of these things are made possible by the ultra-broadband network.”

XiPeng identified three first steps operators need to take to begin the journey of a thousand network upgrades, which presumably happily coincide with three of Huawei’s main three product lines.

“First, we believe video will become a basic service. Secondly, in the B2B world we believe cloud will be the default, and thirdly in the verticals operators will move into new businesses and spaces – such as utilities and automotive – so we will need IoT as the entry point.”

Finally, there was a nice bit of fear-mongering as XiPeng literally said operators in attendance will lose customers if they don’t embrace video.

“In the past operators have treated video as a value added service – you have voice and data as a basic, but for IPTV etc you need to invest $200m, which if the investment is not justified it will be treated as a VAS,” he said. “Video will soon be treated as a part of the broadband package and will be used to attract new customers.

“At Huawei we believe you have no choice but to treat video as part of the basic service, or you will lose subscribers.”

You can watch live video streaming of Broadband World Forum 2016 here.