Editor’s Note: Welcome to our weekly Reality Check column. We’ve gathered a group of visionaries and veterans in the mobile industry to give their insights into the marketplace.
Spend a week in Barcelona, Spain, at the Mobile World Congress event, and you will come back home with a lot of intriguing ideas. You can be overwhelmed by the plethora of new, elegant, sleek tablets, smartphones and the like, and by all the telecom operators’ complaints about OTTs, regulators, etc., but in the the end, the key questions remain: What is the next new thing? What is the killer trend in the tech industry that strategists should focus on for the next couple of years?
My guess is machine-to-machine will be the next revolution to arrive. The connections among things and the exchange of data and information among what used to be passive devices and systems have the potential to create a new IT revolution. Coupled with other trends associated with mobility and LTE, along with cloud computing, M2M could set the scene for the coming years, creating limitless potential in new applications that will automate processes and increase efficiency in the use of multiple resources.
This trend should impact several industries, but it would particularly affect the telecommunications sector. This is an infrastructure-intensive sector that has been stressed by formidable capital demands associated with several waves of technology evolution/substitution (The moves from 2G to 2.5G to 3G, and then LTE are just the more visible side of it). As some industry executives have pointed out, these waves have materialized in consistently shorter cycles over the years.
A high M2M and sensor network coverage has the potential to put even more pressure on investment in this sector. The volume of transported data may increase by a huge order of magnitude (possibly by 1,000 times!); real time connectivity and high performance will be essential — not to mention a huge effort will be needed for infrastructure management and associated challenges as well as yet unknown security issues that could, and probably will, arise.
What will the role of the telecom industry be in this emerging scenario? Many analysts point to the need to move closer to applications, developing an OTT strategy and incorporating IT services into offering portfolios to add value to service providers’ current market positions.
Nevertheless, around this exploding need for infrastructure, some might wonder if the financial and human resources will be available for anything other than providing the necessary connectivity and the communication platforms. In this context, does it make sense for a consolidating telecom sector to move away from their core business? Is connectivity as we know it today a mere basic commodity, or is it the highly valued backbone of a future intelligent network, integrating people, things and processes that will be at the heart of private and public administration, and the origin of all value creation in the world to come?
