January 25, 2005
Boxed in
I was strolling down Holborn in London today when I spotted this phone box:
Now Internet phone boxes have been around for a while and aren’t anything new. What really caught my eye was the marketing message:
(For family viewing the, um, racy calling cards of local ladies at the forefront of British service industry are just out of view. Why they waste their effort soliciting the upstanding senior criminal lawyers who occupy the exclusive offices in Holborn, I can’t imagine.)
Anyway, use this Internet phone box to conduct hotel, tour and ticket transactions and you won’t be explicitly charged for the connecivity. It’s a simple extension of the 0800 freephone model for the 21st century. To the extent that connectivity is scarce while mobile (another day’s rant!) it makes sense. BT differentiates itself by raching the parts other telcos can’t reach.
I guess what BT is heading towards is a “transaction terminal”, a bit like a general-purpose ATM. Even if you have a 3G mobile, the restricted user interface makes complex on-the-go transactions painful. Finding an internet Cafe is probably overkill, and typing “hotel london” into Google is likely to get you pages of unhelpful fruits of search engine optimisation. BT have done the legwork of selecting a trustworthy partner for you. You know it won’t be cheap, but equally it won’t be a fraud. A nice extension of their brand.
It also fits with the core business model archetype of “distribution” for telecom. It extends the geographical reach of certain transactions. The application-layer equivalent of putting cellular relays in the subway tunnels.
I can’t help but notice they haven’t learned from Verizon’s deployment of free Wi-Fi in New York phone boxes for their landline subscribers. BT seem to be missing a simple trick here to leverage their subscriber base — maybe there’s some refulations in the way I don’t know about.
But what really fascinates me about this is that it seems to illustrate a trend. The Paradox of the Best Network suggests that over time you will be forced to run an ever stupider and less profitable network. If so, then any profit is likely to exist in adjacent industries. For instance, consider James Enck’s long held views on telcos and advertising. Since telcos with stupid networks and similar coverage/services can’t differentiate their offerings easily, and don’ want to compete on price, they turn to Madison Avenue to try to separate out the market.
As the maws of the Paradox close, increasingly the money’s in the blue jeans and picks, not the network gold mine. BT becomes a distributor for travel services, with an eye to extending to other markets if it plays out well. They could even be buying dumb pipe connectivity from a third party. For once, I’m quite impressed.
Posted by Martin Geddes at 08:40 PMTrackBack URL for this entry:
http://www.telepocalypse.net/cgi-sys/cgiwrap/mgeddes/MT/mt-tb.cgi/380.
Listed below are links to weblogs that reference Boxed in:
»
The future of transport from GavPOLITICS
There are several major forms of transport over land.
There are:
1) The car
2) Train
3) Aeroplace (airplane for you Gareth and Leanne!)
4) Bicycle
5) Bus
6) Walking
Of there four are considered ‘green’ and two are considered, by some, se...
[Read more]