The Broadband Market Disruption Is Here: Community Is the Winning Playbook
Thank you to the nearly 300 CEOs, GMs, and COOs who joined us at Calix ConneXions 2023 this year. Many who took part for the first time told me it was the most valuable leadership event of the year, providing the opportunity to collaborate with ~3,000 attendees and engage with world-renowned authors Stephen Covey on trust, Daniel Pink on change and Michael Watkins on execution.
At ConneXions we focused on how a broadband service provider (BSP) can move beyond speed with a “Grow Your Community” playbook.
Almost every market will have two fast broadband providers—and if speed and price are the go-to-market strategy, commoditization and price wars are the only outcome—as we have seen in mobile. To compete and win, BSPs need a community strategy that empowers all aspects of the community: residential, business, education, multi-dwelling units (MDUs), and government. This community strategy will successfully add subscribers, margins, and cash flow (as every speaker on the ConneXions main stage demonstrated) as legacy network operators race to the bottom and fail. The market is ripe for the change that the Calix broadband platform is enabling.
Disrupting and Beating Legacy Network Operators: The Time Has Come
While legacy operators speak to investors about homes passed, the five customers who presented their stories on the ConneXions main stage shared how they are transforming their business and measuring success in a very different way. Those customers focused on connected subscribers, cash flow, subscriber satisfaction, and winning the community end to end. They shared how they focused on:
Expecting to get more than 60 percent of passings connected across residential, small and medium business, MDU, education, and government.
Reaching cash-flow positivity in two years and seven-figure profitability in just three years (achieved by the CEO of Tombigbee Fiber).
Exciting customers to achieve a Net Promoter Score℠ (NPS®) of 70+, thereby enabling significantly higher profitability and the opportunity to expand services.
Winning the community’s hearts and minds by being the brand that bridges the digital divide—providing educational opportunities for students (via Calix SmartTown™), boosting the local economy by enabling small businesses (via Calix SmartBiz™), and ensuring physical wellbeing and mental health for families and kids (via Bark social media monitoring, which Calix customers are launching in just 7–21 days, with only Calix Service Cloud required).
All of this is possible based on the simplifying power of the Calix platform, which yields the highest margins and the fastest time to market—as evidenced by the ConneXions speakers and hundreds of stories that customers shared with each other at the conference.
The “Grow Your Community” Playbook: Death of the Legacy Player
At the conference, we talked at length about how a BSP can now serve the entire community—residential, government, business, and MDU—by leveraging the Calix broadband platform. The platform model has incredible power. Using an analogy to illustrate this power, I borrowed from a question posed originally by David Goodspeed, president of OEC Fiber: “Is a pickup truck a consumer vehicle or business vehicle?
The answer is both. GM, Ford, or Dodge pickup trucks are all built as a platform. The platform has common components that allow it to scale and be easily customized for business or consumer use. (In fact, in American Icon: Alan Mulally and the Fight to Save Ford, this move to a platform model was the most important shift that CEO Mulally made to save the company.)
This analogy applies directly to the power of the Calix platform and Calix GigaSpire® BLAST systems. Are they consumer or business? The answer is both. The platform enables them to be both consumer and business; it just depends on what software is running—SmartHome™, SmartBiz, SmartTown, SmartMDU™, or ManagedBiz™.
The days of a single Wi-Fi appliance serving everyone are gone. In the residential example, there are small houses and big houses—covering everything from the pool, to farms, home workshops, concrete-walled or drywalled rooms, apartments, duplexes, and on and on. A platform enables mixing and matching of Wi-Fi appliances—small, medium, large, indoor, outdoor—to meet all use cases while keeping it simple, because every GigaSpire works with every GigaSpire in a nearly infinite number of permutations.
This capability enables the community playbook: Expand your business across the entire community by mixing and matching Wi-Fi appliances, and then running the right software:
- Calix SmartHome™ to provide an experience that earns high NPS, along with incremental capabilities to protect and delight the subscriber while radically expanding to cover farms with the recently announced one-mile-reach outdoor Wi-Fi system.
- SmartTown to enable a ubiquitous mesh across the town and delight the permit-providing mayor by providing broadband roaming for children, coverage of the local football field, and free roaming for first responders.
- SmartBiz to ensure that local businesses are secure and thriving, while expanding in the future to offer new capabilities through newly announced ManagedBiz™ .
- SmartMDU™ to finally offer property managers the business model they want in a simple and exciting way.
Customer-Led Innovation Is the Way Forward
As I said on the main stage at ConneXions, all this innovation comes from our partnership with BSPs. Your ideas inspire us to expand our SmartLife™ solutions to meet new capabilities as you mix and match the systems to meet the needs of the entire community.
In this issue of the Leadership Beacon, we share video presentations from the leaders who spoke onstage at ConneXions. This year, Tombigbee, United Fiber, Hunter Communications, ALLO, and Lumos shared what is possible with the “Grow Your Community” playbook.
If you joined us at ConneXions 2023, thank you. The feedback was so positive that we are going to open registration for the 2024 October 12–15 ConneXions Leadership Track (CEO/CFO/COO/GM) in December. Click here to save the date in your calendar now.
I do hope that I can host you at the next Leadership Track within ConneXions.
As always, I invite you to connect with me directly on LinkedIn or email me at Michael.Weening@calix.com if there is any way I can assist.
Wishing you continued success,
Michael