We heard Francis McInerney, co-author of Futurewealth (see our
review of the book here) and venture capitalist
with North
River Ventures, speak at the Stupidnet conference, where we also picked
up a copy of the book. A few months later, having read the book, we called him
to see what he might predict for the future of wireline and wireless
telecommunications. We published the wireline interview (The
Telecoms Future) yesterday.
Whereas in the wireline telecoms industry, McInerney feels nobody “gets it,”
he feels that one company is doing wireless right: Verizon Wireless (and it’s
not just the really good TV ads).
The key reason is a very basic one. “Cellular companies don’t own cell
towers,” McInerney notes.
On the other hand, the companies that do own towers, like American Tower, are
laden with debt, much like the RBOCs they resemble. But McInerney expects their
fortunes to improve in the long run.
A wireless boom
He expects demand to take off.
“I used to say that every home’s a TV station, and when I did I was hauled
across the carpet. It could be true today, but there are no uplinks.”
When demand takes off again, the wireless companies will be better situated
to take advantage of the new boom. In the book, the authors write, (p.238)
“digging ditches still costs more than ever, placing wired companies at a
disadvantage.”
At the moment, McInerney believes that WiMax could trigger the demand surge,
if it’s done right. “If WiMax allows a distributed antenna technology, you will
see street lamps backhauled to every cell tower.”
At that point, the local WISP, supplying access from every street lamp,
suddenly becomes the key connectivity player. “It’s complete telco bypass.
Existing incumbents might not exist at all in the future. If the finances were
available, it could begin in 24 months. There are plans in some places (cities,
not nations) to make it happen in 12 months.”
Once it starts, there’s no stopping it, he says. “One the conversion starts,
and the technology and business plan are proven, you get a land rush.”
The key concept here is what McInerney calls the “Moore Curve.” Moore’s Law McInerney says that the effect of Moore’s Law is that it forces companies and WISPs At ISP-Planet we have looked down on Cisco as a buyer of technology instead He says Cisco’s competition (with the exception of Juniper) takes far longer McInerney grades the carriers in the same way. “I grade them ABCDEF on this “But can Cisco keep buying,” we ask. “Yes. There are two schools of acquisitions. There’s the Chemical Bank McInerney argues that as long as the marketing machine works, acquisitions Oddly enough, that means that wireless equipment vendors that are doing sales Similarly, WISPs need to do anything but buy each other. One successful WISP Don’t expect consolidation on the Chemical Bank model. (We expected this, “Take the number of consumers in the world, say 1.2 billion, and divide by If that happens, those WISPs with a local reputation for customer service and
prescient observation by Gordon Moore, Intel co-founder, who, in 1965, said that
CPU capacity would double every year. More recently, it has doubled every 18
months, but the principle holds true.
even entire industries to innovate. Those that don’t get left in the dust, like
Kmart trying to catch up with Wal-Mart, or Compaq trying to compete with Dell. It’s the customers, not the technology
will not succeed because of their understanding of the technology, McInerney
suggests, but because they understand their customers. Many of the companies we
admire for their engineering skills, like HP, will fall to companies that are
better at sales, like Dell.
of an inventor. McInerney tells us we’re wrong to do so. “It takes Cisco 8 days
to turn a sale into cash. At the time of the telecoms crisis, it took 39 days.
John Chambers is brilliant. Everybody knew he was a great leader during growth
times, but telecoms now is in a no-growth phase. He’s really tightened up on
operations. You can only get down to 8 days if the organization is tuned so that
the responsiveness is almost immediate.”
to turn a sale into cash, citing a few numbers: Nortel takes 69 days, Ericsson
92 days, Alcatel 86 days. “What [these numbers say] is that if you want to know
how Cisco is beating you, it’s because they manage inventory, payables, and
receivables better than you.”
metric. The only one that’s a crack carrier is Verizon Wireless.”
schoolbuy a company every 18 months or two years, and consolidate to gain
market share. But Cisco’s not acquiring for market share. It’s acquiring
expertise it doesn’t have, almost always in a specific product area.”
are safe. “Assuming that two parts work well, the CFO part and sales and
marketing, acquiring technology is relatively risk free.”
and marketing right will acquire those that are stronger in engineering. Look at
the market, and you’ll see that this has been happening for some time, as when
Floware bought BreezeCom and called the combined entity Alvarion.
told us, not for attribution, that he stopped buying neighboring WISPs. “I just
build out until they’re on the edge of my coverage area, and then I wait for
them to fail.” Then he either builds out himself, or buys some or all of the
WISP assets out of bankruptcy court.
see US Wireless Online,
AIR2LAN Merge and A Big WISP Merger, but
we were wrong.) Do, however, expect fierce competition. There will be big
rewards for the survivors. McInerney provides some rough numbers.
four to get 300 million households. Maybe there are 1.5 TVs per household, so
there are 450 million TVs. But if everyone is a TV station, and the Moore Curve
puts devices into peoples hands, people, including children, could have four or
five devices each. We may be talking about the low hundreds of millions to tends
of billions of devices sold each year in a short period of time.”
the ability to respond to change will win like Cisco won in the big wired
buildout. It is not clear which equipment vendor would win, but McInerney
suggests that the smaller, more nimble companies like Alvarion and Trango and
Orthogon and Vivato and Aperto should not ignore the bigger players like
Motorola and Cisco if those bigger companies prove to be nimble.
