Determined never again to face invasion from the East after World War 1, the French government spent a fortune building the vast line of forts called the Maginot line stretching along its Italian and German borders. In the end, the Luftwaffe simply flew over it and the German Army went around it through Belgium. Generally considered one of the great failures of military history, the term "Maginot Line" is now sometimes used as a metaphor for something that is confidently relied upon.

Something similar now seems at work in our industry. While regulators have been quite successful at opening up the ‘last mile’ of fixed line networks, the ‘last mile’ of wireless is still firmly in the hands of mobile service providers. Although mobile virtual network operators have sprung up, they have not been wildly successful to date, so the infrastructure wireless operators have a pretty good lock on this last piece in the jigsaw.

Which is why Google and Skype seem intent on getting round the ‘Maginot line’ by embedding their software on as many handsets as possible. Their equivalent of Belgium is using IP connectivity (GPRS, EDGE, 3G even Wi-Fi) to get around the operator’s ability to control the user’s service. Google’s recent announcement of the Android project plays directly into this “get round” strategy and their sabre rattling of buying spectrum in the US is designed to scare off any doubters that they are serious about getting directly in front of the end user.

Why are they doing this? Does Google want to be a phone company? I don’t think so for one minute. They make their money from companies upstream in their value chain – the e-commerce and advertising revenues they unlock, not downstream users like phone companies. The more users looking at their content and the more they know about them (such as where they are) the more valuable becomes the ‘inventory’ that they offer their advertisers. Monetizing 6 billion eyeballs worldwide is very valuable indeed and Google wants to stay well ahead of the game. If someone else cracks mobile advertising (heaven forbid it’s the phone companies taking the initiative), Google potentially gets squeezed into only being a player that can reach an audience on PC’s. In the emerging ‘any content on any device, anywhere’ world, that would be a bad place to be, so Google’s move is both self defence as well as opportunistic.

What should the mobile operators do about this move? The tanks are lining up on the horizon and the Maginot line can be breached. Ignoring it and hoping it will go away would not be a smart move. Trying to fight it by developing their own ‘upstream’ facing business selling all sorts of players - not just advertisers-  valuable information about their user base would be a good move. Or the two camps working together might be an even smarter idea – after all communications players know squat about the advertising business and Google knows squat about the mobile business.

But if push comes to shove, I know who I would bet my money on learning the fastest. We had a good chat on all of this at the Executive Masterclass held at our Management World in Dallas a couple of weeks ago. The whole concept of developing a new class of customers upstream of the operator as well as conventional end users is an exciting area for the communications industry. It has pretty radical implications of how a communications company works and how its processes and systems get organised.

So it has big implications for an organisation like TM Forum and that piques my interest. If this is a viable approach and service providers do start to move in that direction, what kind of business frameworks and technologies will be needed to support that business?  

What do you think about this? Let me know your thoughts on the subject.