The Next Big Shift in Telecom

When I look at communications services right now, a few questions come to mind. What’s the next big shift in telecom? What can providers do to capitalize on it? Where do third party developers and designers fit in?

Over the next decade, the answers to a lot of these questions will become clear. The problem is that the investment in the next phase needs to happen now. I really connected with Chetan Sharma’s 2012 study. It’s called “The Operator’s Dilemma (and Opportunity): the 4th Wave,” and it’s essential reading for anyone in the comm sector.

Sharma articulates the revenue curves associated with Voice and SMS, the first two waves of mobile services. With each wave we get a peak in saturation and then, after a brief plateau, they start to decline.

Right now, the Access business is still on the upswing but it won’t be long until it peaks. Providers might take a stab at mobile commerce, or cloud services, or harnessing the analytic potential of their enormous user-bases. It’s up to telecom decision makers to decide which of these opportunities they’re best situated to take on. The agility of a smaller firm means it can develop, release, test, assess, and pivot at the pace that human-centred design requires. They’re user-focused, and that means from an organizational standpoint they have to be built from the outside in, not the inside out.

That’s why collaboration between big telecom and small developers is great for everyone involved. In order for that to happen, operators are going to have to open up the power of their enormous infrastructure to small firms who can handle this kind of design.

So what’s your strategy?

Whether you’re a decision maker at a telecom enterprise or you’re providing the vision for a small firm made up of devs eager to burst out of the gate and design something new, the most important thing to do is make contact, share expectations, and get creating.

Excerpted from full article at http://myplanet.io/article/telco-worldview/