Telepocalypse

Say what?

I’ve just been doing some reading on the usual telecom business model debacles, and something popped into my mind. We’re using the wrong words to talk about the participants.

The limits of my language are the limits of my mind. All I know is what I have words for.— Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, 1953

Today I’ve read articles about “cablecos”, “cellcos”, and of course “telcos”. This is all horribly misleading. Each of these businesses has varying degrees of forced bundling of connectivity and service. But we really should make the distinction between connectivity providers and service providers truly stark.

For instance, over at Forbes they say:

In a world of Net phones, local monopolies and duopolies will no longer exist; Internet consumers will have every telco in the country competing to win their business.

The word “telco” has clearly lost all of its traditional meaning in the above sentence. And if we can’t consistently use the word to say something, it has no meaning. In the wise words of our philosopher friend:

For a large class of cases—though not for all—in which we employ the word “meaning” it can be defined thus: the meaning of a word is its use in the language. — Philosophical Investigations

(Incidentally, there are some great quotes in the Forbes article: The rest of the telecom industry, however, seems to be in denial of the coming cataclysm. Fears that phone traffic will migrate to cheap networks are grossly overblown, according to the Telecommunications Industry Association, a leading trade group. It forecasts that revenue has hit bottom in the U.S. in every single category of the phone business, from local to toll calls to wireless. Hey, didn’t Christensen say you had your best years just before you fall off the cliff of disruptive innovation?)

Anyway, back to linguistics. First, connectivity. For these, “netcos”. We recognize that Internet connectivity is the key for most public networks. For the rare occasions when you need a truly private pipe, you go to a “pipeco”.

At the other end of the spectrum are pure service providers like Vonage or Amazon. Their applications let you buy connectivity service from anyone. These are “servicecos”.

In the middle you have the legacy business model. Hmm. Something mildly derogatory needed that highlights the limited lifespan of service and connectivity bundling. Must encompass telcos, cablecos and cellcoes. How about “Nogocos”? Too obscure. “Controlcos”? Still not right. Aargh! We don’t have a word to describe the business model we argue is going away!

Any better ideas out there?