Cablenet-Plume: A collaboration that has disrupted the telecoms market

The CEOs of Cablenet and its strategic partner Plume have one very important thing in common: they want to disrupt the telecoms market with the sole purpose of making people’s everyday internet life easier and less complex.

Plume’s AI-driven technology aims to do just that, offering the ultimate home connectivity experience that can transform people’s everyday lives and offer true peace of mind.

Cablenet CEO Yiannos Michaelides and Plume CEO Fahri Diner joined forces at a press conference on 9 June, to present their vision and look back on the progress that has been made over the past year and since they first started collaborating since 2019.

Around this time last year, said Michaelides, a similar meeting was held with telecommunications executives from around the world. At the time, Cablenet decided to take a step back.

“Let’s take a step back and look at the state of the telecoms industry. Are we happy with what we see? Are we comfortable with the business model that is there? Is there something that we can do better? And one of the things we did right off the bat was to challenge the complexity that exists in the telecoms industry,” he explained. “When people think of telecoms operators they see megabytes, megabits; 2G,3G, 4G,5G, and we are even talking about 6G these days. So this is quite a complex world and I think what we have become, is technology drivers instead of being experience drivers, instead of being solution drivers. On top of that this is the way that we present ourselves to you. Quite a complex proposition with a lot of terms and conditions. A lot of different things that make for what we call a decision labyrinth.”

So Cablenet decided that there must be a better way of doing things, said Michaelides. “So we said we are here to shake the status quo. It doesn’t matter how small we are, we are based in Cyprus, but we are here to disrupt the market. We are here to lead not to be led by everything that has been happening in the telecoms industry.”

The end result was the company’s two products: Purple Max Mobile and Purple Max Internet; and its collaboration with Plume.

Referring to the Purple Max products, Michalides said: “That was a disruption when we introduced that. The market was totally different at that time and in fact we actually moved the market into a totally different space.”

He added, “These are the last brands we will ever need. No more thinking, no more decision-making labyrinths.”

Regarding the collaboration with Plume, Cablenet’s CEO said he watched Fahri Diner address conferences before and thought: “This person really has the vision that was missing in the telecoms industry.”

So since addressing all these issues last year and changing its approach, he said, the company has managed to convince its customers to actually pay more to get the value that Plume has to offer.

Has it worked? Here are the numbers:

Cablenet has been consistently number one in terms of customer satisfaction, as well as when it comes to being recommended by third parties. Also employee satisfaction within the company has doubled in the past few years. Its brand equity almost doubled as well. According to Cablenet’s recently announced financial results, between 2021 and 2022, there was a 40% increase in its subscriber base, a 102% increase in mobile subscribers, 19.4% rise in revenue and it was the number 1 leader in customer satisfaction.

“So clearly this partnership with Plume works. And the reason it works is because we share the same philosophies. We share the philosophy of veering away from being technology drivers to being experience drivers. We do whatever it takes on a daily basis to provide a perfect life for us,” Michaeildes concluded.

On his part, Fahri Diner gave a brief overview of the global TMT (technology-media-telecoms) industry, recalling how in the 1990s, the focus when it came to the internet was on its productivity and bringing it to people’s homes. It then shifted to internet speeds and so on; what he likes to refer to as the “performance phase”.

“Until about a couple of years ago, the industry just wanted to deliver bits and bytes, faster, bigger pipes and all of that,” Diner explained. “And that was all driven by entertainment, social, all the video channels and stuff that came over the top. What Yiannos and the teams have realised – this is what we’ve been kind of thinking for a while – is that that game is going to plateau.”

The focus has now moved into the living room, that is, people’s homes. “The triple play bundle that telecoms have been selling for a long time – voice, video, internet – is melting. I might even go as far as to say it has melted,” he said. “So the next play we believe is inside the home.”

His experience from his contacts with the c-level executives of major international telecoms companies – “we have about 400 customers right now… including the number 1 and 2 operators in the US, Canada, Europe, number 1 in Japan” – has shown that consumers’ needs moving forward have changed.

“Beyond bits and bytes, they want personalisation,” said Diner. “They want personalised experiences in their home.” They also want protection, he said, explaining that many home devices connected to our Wi-Fi networks are not safe.

“People want privacy, it’s a big deal. Homes are unique places. You can only come to my home if you’re invited,” he explained. “This is going to be a theme, we’ve talked about this and there are a lot of things that my company is doing to address that.”

And beyond this, consumers want to be in control of what’s going on in their homes.

“But that doesn’t mean complexity. The big thing that we want, the consumer wants, is simplicity. So in everything we do in our company these are the tellers that we think about every day,” Plume’s CEO said.

And he said that despite its small size, Cablenet brings a lot to the table and is the perfect example of an innovator in the telecoms industry.