Product managers of landline telecom service — which we normally think of as people who work for incumbent local telcos, but soon will start to include landline voice managers who work at cable companies — continue to agonize over the ongoing trend of cord-cutting. That is, customers disconnecting or never connecting fixed telephone lines in favor of using their mobile phones exclusively.

 

There is no relief in sight, say analysts at Forrester Research (News - Alert). “Product managers should forgo any hope that Gen-Y cord-cutters will come back to a landline in the future,” says Charles Golvin, Forrester analyst. “Instead, these product managers should craft new bundled offerings that will win cord-cutters’ business for the future.”

 

The problem is acute for telcos, but only a coming problem for cablecos. Losing landline accounts is bad enough, but high-margin services ride on top of those access lines, such as voice mail and others. Cable companies don’t have to worry about that problem yet, as they still are taking landline share, and do not make incremental revenue from voice mail and other services, which are simply bundled with the basic service, as most VoIP providers also do.

 

Those services include broadband and mobile, with TV as an add-on, Golvin argues. The good news: This is one of those times when executives are quite possibly ahead of the analysts and pundits. That basic strategy has been in place for some time. It remains unclear how well fixed/mobile convergence will succeed in the mass market, as opposed to simple wireless substitution.

 

To the extent that an FMC approach works, it might be the broadband connection that remains important, not the landline. But telcos are going to continue to experiment with ways to integrate and upgrade the landline experience with mobile and other voice applications, rather than simply abandoning it.