Telecom Operators Of The Future

Telecom operators are facing a year of falling revenues from voice services. They have started to earn revenues on IoT-services, selling greetings with photos and videos in social networks, providing their infrastructure for rent, which indicates the transformation of companies from telecommunications to technology. Why is the business of mobile operators dying and what other changes are expected by the telecom industry in the future?

Today, the revenues of telecom operators from the provision of classic services to subscribers (voice and data communication) are declining. The penetration of services already exceeds 100% (many subscribers have several SIM cards from one or more operators). The market for standard telecom operator services has nowhere to grow. Moreover, at the moment, users receive quite enough in a single basic package of services for the tariff for all their communication and work needs so there is no need to purchase additional packages.

Moreover, subscribers prefer to make regular calls through messengers and for holidays and special events use greetings with photos and videos via social networks. This forces the operators to create their own similar services.

However, the issue of monetization here remains open. Moreover, in the competitive struggle with OTT services (WhatsApp, Viber, Skype, etc.), operators can offer subscribers convergence of services, for example, outside the coverage of a cellular network using the Internet, for example, Wi-Fi, redirect regular calls to their messengers. Forecasts for the development of the cellular communications market in such conditions at first glance do not seem to be favorable. But there is still an exit for the cellular communication market players – the players are on the way to the transformation from a standard service provider to a service operator.

Subscribers are beginning to take full advantage of the high mobile speeds and new functionality of their gadgets. And new services, as you know, directly depend on the quality and width of the channel provided by operators. One of the most vivid examples of users’ interest in new capabilities of smartphones was the frantic popularity of the game Pokemon Go. Only the first day alone it was downloaded by 900,000 people around the world and for two months the number of players exceeded 500 million users.

Now operators are taking their first steps towards the service model and are betting on content that absorbs more and more traffic. Technologies of augmented and virtual reality, the emergence of chatbots, new algorithms for working with large data stimulate operators to upgrade existing infrastructure, introduce new technologies, launch more attractive services for subscribers and search for more efficient models of working with partners.