Altnets are making sound progress in a number of areas, yet most have not addressed the fundamental issue – that they are market followers.
We commend altnets’ drive to build scale, as we believe scale is paramount for profitability in today’s mature market.
We believe the recent altnet merger and acquisition (M&A) activity is a good move not only for the altnets themselves, but for the industry as a whole too.
We also commend selected altnets’ drive to focus their business on specific customer segments.
Attempting to be ‘all things to all customers’ with limited resources, while facing a dominant opponent is risky at best, and doomed for failure at worst.We are concerned by altnets’ continued behaviour as ‘market followers’, which does not bode well for the future of altnets.
Most altnets continue to define themselves by the incumbent, and do little to innovate.
We are baffled by the fact that few altnets attempt to differentiate on anything other than price.
In our view, altnets still fail to exploit incumbents’ shortcomings in their customer service and their fragmented and technology driven marketing.
The exceptions to this, Fastweb in Italy and Free in France, only serve to confirm this assessment.