The Future of Telecom
I spent some time at the RVC SoftEdge Conference today. The panel on telecomm was pretty depressing.
Dr David Cleevely, of the consulting firm Analysys, says that telecomm revenues worldwide are going to shrink over the next ten years as the business gets increasingly commoditized.
He also says that the mobile market is going to flatten out soon as that market saturates.
Maybe the most controversial comment Cleevely made was his opinoin that the WLAN (802...) market is not going to be very large as 3G and other technologies will be clearly superior.
Ohad Finkelstein gave us his entertaining "five layers" of telecomm
1 - In the ground - the fiber. so much of this investment will go wasted.
2 - The PTTs - they are around to stay, but with a ton of debt. they can't innovate.
3 - Alternative Carriers - this wil be a very thin layer.
4 - Resurection - WorldCom and others. they will come back with clean balance sheets.
5 - Newco - none of these anywhere in sight.
These guys were really bearish. They may be right. But my take on this is somewhat different.
I think the telecomm market isn't falling apart, it is just rebuilding itself in horizontal layers ala the technology industry. This deconstruction and reconstruction may take a while to play out and result in a lot of pain, but the net result will be an open network like the data network we have which is the Internet. that will provide a platform for innovation that will eventually take the telecomm industry forward again.
I think that the telecoms industry is in a state of flux still! Very few of the old telecoms firms have undertaken the changes needed to face a digital future.
The fixed guys are still not tuned into the data world and what services such as VoIP will do to there traditional businesses.
The wireless guys just don't have a clue at present. They European Networks are yet to figure who the customer is and how to get them to spend more, how to launch and build 3G networks and just what is data.
The Equipment makers are all still suffering from the fall in telecoms. If you look at Motorola what do you see? Nokia have forgotten how they got to be so big and are now about to fall. What innovation are we seeing from Cisco, Avaya, Nortel Networks et al.
This year we will see are far smaller Telecoms event in Geneva compared to the hype of 1999 event. The biggest issue on show will be the lack of vision in the industry.
If you want to see Telecoms drive forward what is needed is headhunters who are brave. They must be capable of finding real talent to lead and manage global businesses for the next 5-10 years!
Posted by: Digital Evangelist | October 01, 2003 at 10:13 AM
I see this industry going through major consolidation in the next 5-10 years......much as was seen with telcos xx years ago.
With that said, I do see growth and change in the areas of 3g and voip. In particular I'm interested to see how the boys at Skype (http://www.skype.com) affect the landscape via p2p. I wonder what McLuhan would say.
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Posted by: Aparaty cyfrowe | January 18, 2006 at 07:32 AM
It's funny to read this 8 years later.
Flat market? Hmm. iPhone? Android?
On the other hand: he was spot on with WLAN. Total Fail.
Posted by: jfaughnan | February 13, 2011 at 11:57 PM