TORONTO – Tony Ciciretto directed a rather unusual question to Canada’s telecom sector – why does it insist on competing in areas where it would make more sense to work together?
In a speech on Monday as part of the Toronto Board of Trade’s technology series, the president of Cogeco Data Services said that fierce competition on infrastructure development has served to turn networks into just a commodity.
“This may seem like heresy coming from a guy who runs a company that may be best known for its network, but as an industry we are over-building our network infrastructure”, Ciciretto said. “It is not strategic.”
Ciciretto said that collaboration would not only “free up valuable resources that would allow us to compete like crazy”, but would also promote differentiation which in turn would offer customers “creative innovations that are going to help them generate real productivity gains”.
“In the telecom sector, collaboration should be easier for us than in many other sectors”, he continued. “We have a head start. We already partner with the competition more than most industries. We all buy from each other and our networks are already connected. No single provider has a network that spans the entire country. We all manage a pipeline that includes someone else’s network, services or equipment.”
But collaboration is more than “a collection of tools and tactics”, Ciciretto continued. It must be viewed as “a strategic imperative” in order to achieve its goal of driving innovation.
“The next step is apparent – we need to progress from partnerships of convenience to true strategic partnerships", he added. "If we do that, everyone has the opportunity to become more innovative.”
– Lesley Hunter
