Trends 2016: Buzzwords that will gain momentum

By Vaibhav Mehta

The telecom landscape is geared up for significant developments and opportunities. And the need of the hour is, operators start thinking about the opportunities and map it with their business strategies.

A few of the buzzwords that will gain momentum in the coming year are:

• The concept of Smart Cities has also gained a lot of traction, and cities around the world are harnessing the power of technology to offerseamless connectivity, real-time information and user authentication. It is expected that the smart city market will value more than $1 trillion by 2016, growing at over 14 percent annually as per a recent MarketsandMarkets study.

As governments look for offering superior service to its citizen, CSPs are in a strong position to leverage their existing network infrastructure to help government offer solutions that will serve as the foundation for their transition to smart services.

• Network Infrastructure as a Service/Sharing: Service providers with heavy infrastructure investments can add more services which could mean additional investments. But if optimising existing networks and reducing operational cost is on the top priority list then offering the infrastructure for use could lead to a new revenue stream.

As commercial considerations, rather than regulatory mandates have become a catalyst for the CSPs to share their network infrastructure with either competition or launch multiple sub-brands to optimize the investments made in network infrastructure resulting into rapid realization ofCapex.

• Most of the CSPs have already opted for Digital Transformation or have significant plans to transform their networks in the near future. This requires them to build a new customer digital experience which is smart, adaptive, lean, and importantly ensures faster Time to Market. Service providers need to reassess, realign and rationalize all the critical capabilities required for enabling the digitization of key business processes within different layers of O/BSS components.

For digitization to be successful, there has to be a synergy in the entire telecom value chain from Network Equipment Vendors, Software Solution Vendors, Government to CSPs themselves.

• Analytics: It has become a key tool for CSPs to unlock the real time intelligence from their networks, which enables them to take more informed and quicker decisions.
It equips them with customer’s data usage behavior to better understand consumers and create a local and personal service offering. It is all about sending the right offer at the right time to the relevant end user resulting in increase in offer uptake.

• Cloud: Cloud is a realty for many services already. NFV and virtualisation services are fast becoming the new norm for telecom industry also and the possibilities are limitless. As more data travels through operators network to sustain and profit operators need to reduce their cost while ensure quick time to market for new offers.

The increase in the adoption of cloud-based services for computing infrastructure, software platforms and business applications has spurred service providers to look for new revenue opportunities while acting as trusted providers for cloud model.

• Cloud based solutions enables operators with the significant time to market advantage by automating processes such as application deployment, maintenance and capacity planning. NFV enabled applications help break the dependency of software on Hardware , Virtualized softwares can run independent of underlying hardware thereby giving the much improved performance and scalability at a lower cost.

• IoT: Linking new and legacy sensors within an IoT ecosystem often means that businesses wanting to realize value from the IoT need to work closely with their communication services providers (CSPs).

Besides Smart Cities, the Internet of Things (IoT) is another technology trend gaining high momentum thanks to the rise of smarter machines like intelligent thermostats, wearable health gadgets, and driver less vehicle prototypes.
Such technologies are compelling because they make the things more program-able to ‘Act’ in a desired way. The sensors that make things “smart” are only part of the IoT.
Connecting all these sensors is what transforms isolated things into a network that generates and collects data leading to valuable and actionable information. Linking new and legacy sensors within an IoT ecosystem often means that businesses wanting to realize value from the IoT need to work closely with their communication services providers (CSPs). Because, how companies create value is often a function of the interaction between sensor technology and the network layer

• Wireless Devices: The devices will soon overtake wired devices in terms of IP traffic and in 2016 will account for over 50% of Internet traffic and this is why innovation in Wi-Fi has taken up a center stage to deliver value for the CSPs and end-users.
Next-generation Wi-Fi Calling and Voice over LTE through a smartphone dialler, will offer a completely different experience to its users with better indoor coverage and seamless call transfer support between Wi-Fi and LTE. With these advantages, Wi-Fi calling is set to become the de-facto standard very soon.

(The author, Vaibhav Mehta, is Senior Vice President, Business Development & Telecom Practices, Elitecore Technologies)