James Enck, the global telecom strategist at Daiwa Securities, has a well-read blog on the European telecom scene, which earned him an invite to speak at the Telco 2.0 conference. His love letter to the assembled telecom executives? A presentation titled "Ten Things I Hate About You." Enck, who's clearly more interested in influencing people than making friends with the telco crowd, outlines the uneasiness investors have about the telecom sector and makes a compelling case for reforming the business.

The first complaint: telecoms have lost control of voice - their core product - to upstarts like Skype. And then there's the fact that customers may not be that interested in the "packages" of voice, Internet, and TV the phone companies are now hawking; increasingly, where Internet-only service is an option, as in South Korea, customers are choosing the raw Internet connection without anything else.

There's also the industry's troubled track record with innovation: They can't build new stuff, they can't move fast enough to buy it - so perhaps they shouldn't bother, says Enck. It turns out that tending to basic network infrastructure is a business telcos manage to do well, and they can generate a fair bit of cash from it, as BT has shown - so why bother trying to create the next MySpace or Skype, when you can profit nicely from the explosion of traffic those sites generate?