How do you make money in power, transport and other such “infrastructure” industries? Most likely, by doing what you have to do most efficiently (i.e., at lowest cost).
The case I am interested in is that of telecom industry. Telecom industry is seeing commoditization of its services. Broadband connections, for example, compete on price per bytes moved. Only the most efficient bit-movers would win such a game. Voice operators compete on price per minute. While this seems a little more flexible than the price per byte owing to the fact that bytes required to carry a minute of voice may vary on quality of service and compression, it seems unlikely that operators aren’t already on efficient horizon in these technical aspects. Only mobile-VAS services seem to escape this price-per-unit of bandwidth paradigm. Mobile VAS in India has so far been a small percentage of operators’ revenues.