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24 August, 2018As consumers’ appetites for new, capacity-consuming personal and business applications grow, 24/7 broadband connectivity is crucial for maintaining and creating revenue-generating opportunities for operators and OTT providers alike, writes Janez Öri, the strategy and business development director at Iskratel.
19 July, 2018Operators face a series of challenges as they grapple to determine their role in the digital value chain and struggle with the continued need to invest in infrastructure in order to bring new services to market. At a recent Openet media event, George Malim caught up with chief executive Niall Norton to gauge his views on what the operators of the future will look like.
George Malim: As operators focus on how to compete in the digital services market is their insistence on providing carrier-grade services starting to shift? Could we see services come to market more rapidly in a beta testing mode?
Niall Norton: A service delivery environment will always have an obsession about carrier-grade reliability, it’s an easy metric so it’s easy to apportion blame when it goes wrong. If you’re partnering you can blame someone else so proof of fault will be required.
The tools are our there now but they are a lot less specialist and a lot less complex than carrier-grade tools. These will just keep getting better and better and we’ll see things like videoconferencing that doesn’t hit the internet so the quality can be assured.
Things will still go wrong but the internet is understood to be not carrier-grade so I think operators will learn to dry their tears of regret at not being carrier-grade.
GM: Will operators continue to be consumer brands? Can you envisage communications becoming just another bundled service offered by a bank or a utility service for example?
NN: There’s a segmentation of operators going, particularly among this big ones which can afford to buy media content and have real ambitions of getting into other services. You could see them selling electricity or security in partnership with others and it’s possible that communications services could be sold by other organisations.
New service areas for operators are all real and will all come to pass pretty quickly. Operators, particularly the big ones, have an unassailable advantage in the 5G space with the assets they have at the edge of the network. This means they can make decisions at the signalling layer and this capability can be exploited at the network edge.
GM: Which new services do you see being successful for operators?
NN: Security, tracking and virtual reality will be important – especially in factories –and they don’t need massive amounts of fibre. We see AT&T, Verizon, Orange and BT taking serious steps away from the traditional telco model but all sorts of new models, some of which are not known today, will emerge.
GM: Operators seem stuck with the old model, though, especially when you look at the 5G investment burden. How will they survive and thrive in the digital era when they’re encumbered with traditional infrastructure investment?
NN: If people look at 5G as being like 4G, they’re stuffed because they won’t be able to raise the money. Operators’ share prices are unbelievably sensitive to price wars and anything to do with margin constriction has a massive affect. In the US, for example, when T-Mobile dropped its price the others had to compete with it but to do so they had to shut down almost everything in order to maintain margins for the Street. If margin drops by 1%, an operator’s share price can drop by 10%.
This means announcing massive investment in 5G isn’t going to happen. However, the 5G business case is around services people want that require spectrum. That means high bandwidth interactive TV or super-high definition cameras on new devices.
We’ll therefore see 5G deployed in support of these types of services. We’re now getting purchase orders for the development of software tools to support 5G so it’s now a reality but these are targeted investments in the delivery of specific services and value propositions.
Operators aren’t changing because they want to. They have the choice of being a mammal and adapting to the market conditions or being a dinosaur just after the meteor hits.
05 July, 2018With mergers and acquisitions (M&A) activity in the telecoms, media and technology (TMT) market at an all-time high, according to research from Thomson Reuters, Mo Aneese, who works in the investment team at private equity firm, Livingbridge, tells George Malim that telecoms-related investments are now really about enabling cloud services.
05 June, 2018Network Function Virtualisation (NFV) has been a source of a lot of doubt for the telecoms industry over the years. The fight to dominate the market with this technology is far from over, says Robin Kent, director of European operations, Adax. Frustration has grown as it has gathered little momentum. (more…)
22 May, 2018Communications service providers (CSPs) are moving from talking about digital transformation to engaging in real projects. However, these aren’t cheap and investor demands for uninterrupted dividends could cause momentum to stall, writes George Malim.
26 March, 2018An EU-wide database that pulls together all available information on financing for European tech companies; that is one of the recommendations of a new report prepared by the joint European Commission–European Investment Bank (EIB) InnovFin Advisory. (more…)
25 January, 2018Fusion Risk Management, Inc., a provider of business continuity risk management software and services, has added two senior sales executives in the United Kingdom. Derek McGee and Laura Sloan joined Fusion this month as the company expands European operations to meet rapidly growing demand for its solutions. (more…)
05 January, 2018China is accelerating 5G development and hopes 5G will become an engine for the country’s new industrialisation and digital transformation, replicating its industrial policy that produced success in 4G. (more…)
28 September, 2017MATRIXX Software has announced that Wind Tre will use MATRIXX Software as a digital commerce platform for its Wind and 3 brands. (more…)
28 August, 2017On a recent trip to a network operator in Africa, I noticed something strange. Traditionally this operator had an issue with a particular type of revenue loss from fraud, yet now this issue seemed to have disappeared. Great news, you might think? (more…)
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