The Deloitte report “Next Generation Telco Architect” paints a contrasting picture of threats and opportunities for the telecom industry as communications service providers (CSP) grapple with declining revenues and their potential relegation to no more than just providers of pipe to content and over-the-top (OTT) internet providers.
Deloitte noted that CSPs as in the same boat as other industries – digital innovations are reshaping business models. The difference, however, is that the digital potential for CSPs is higher than others (see figure 1).
Figure 1: Business model disruption: digital transformation
Source: Digital Disruption – Short Fuse, Big Bang?, Deloitte 2014
Deloitte commented that CSPs understand that to seize the opportunities resulting from digital transformation, they must create new digital services, build capabilities that enable an effective engagement of digital customers and leverage the huge amount of data collected every day to improve service quality and produce new valuable services.
"As the industry tried to build these solutions, it’s going to be about bringing together regulators, vendors, carriers and industry partners. We have to start getting people around the table, sitting down and talking about monetization, the creation of use cases, and accepting the urgency to solve enterprise and city-state-type problems,” said Hugh Ujhazy, associate vice president, IoT and telecommunications, IDC.
At the recently concluded Huawei 5G Asia Industry Roundtable 2018 delegates from the telecoms industry in Asia discussed just that – identifying the regulatory challenges, the types of solutions that 5G may enable, the role ICT infrastructure in the creation of those services, and how an ecosystem approach to harnessing the potential of 5G may be the right strategy to pursue.
Highlighting some of the key points that flowed from the roundtable, Ujhazy is confident that CSPs will bring the use cases to market. He cautioned however that many such use cases will not be directed at consumers but rather at helping mobile connectivity to key enterprises like utility, transportation, street lighting and smart city initiatives.
“5G is an exciting evolution over the current mobile networks and will bring a sea change to the way telecoms operators offer services. It’s going to be faster, it will have less delays, it’s going to be able to handle more things. We’ve opened up a whole spectrum of new things we can do with mobile that we’ve never been able to do. The sort of a change requires careful planning, strategizing, understanding who’s got the problem and how we solve that problem,” Ujhazy confided.
Click on the video above to listen Ujhazy share his thoughts on how CSPs can and will capitalize on the opportunities and challenges presented by 5G.