With the clock running down on a chance to get in front of the competition, Jack Cassidy, Cincinnati Bell CEO, told a crowd of mostly small Independent telcos at CoBank's Communications Industry Executive Forum last month that there is no formula for success. There is only relevance — and teenagers.

Although Cincinnati Bell is closer to a traditional local exchange carrier than it is a rural, Independent telco, Cassidy said the challenges of competition are the same.

“There's not one form of telecom competition that does not exist in Cincinnati,” he said, “and they're all designed to kill Cincinnati Bell.”

To survive, he said, you have to have a product or service that is relevant to 18- to 25-year-olds.

“We are selling a product that comes into the house, but when it rings, no one wants to answer it,” Cassidy said. “The wireless industry will make their phone do anything we want it to do. But the telephone industry has been around since Christ wore knickers, and we can't make ours do anything.”

Mark Steinberg, director of business development for Hill Associates, agreed. “If you don't have an 18- to 25-year-old in your family, borrow someone else's because you need to understand them,” Steinberg said.

Cassidy said service providers need to understand their customers better.

Most rural phone companies don't really have a problem with that. They are as close to their customers as any competitor is likely to get. But that closeness only goes so far. “Heck, we have seven J.D. Power awards, and 7% of our customers are still leaving,” Cassidy said. “So focus on the relevancy of your product.”

To make a product relevant, Cassidy said it has to cater to the things consumers cherish most: entertainment and convenience. “And why do people value convenience above all else?” he asked. “Because they have more money than time.”

One way to do that, at least conceptually, is to forget that hot-button term known as convergence, Steinberg said, and think in terms of synergies.

Naturally you have to be patient and compromise when moving to an all-IP architecture to allow such synergies, but “you have to recognize how fast the world is moving around you,” Steinberg said.