Kafka and Radiohead less depressing than 2010 mobile industry predictions
By Davey Winder in Editorial
Posted in networks, Economy, Business, broadband, Blog, Mobile Phones on
Usually the kind of crystal ball rubbing industry predictions that start arriving at this time of year are fairly upbeat affairs. Not so when it comes to the batch announced at the telecoms and media Industry Outlook event in London which, to be honest, were pretty depressing on the whole.
Heck, you know it’s not going to be a fun ride when the press release includes in the strap line “2010: a year of slow recovery” and mentions “cost control” in the same breath.
The organisers of the annual Industry Outlook event, Informa Telecom & Media, and specifically the Chief Research Officer Mark Newman who, speaking at the event, insisted that it had “selected the most compelling and critical predictions from across all our research areas”. Mark if these are the most compelling then I recommend anyone working in these sectors put up the barricades, make sure they have enough tins of baked beans to last a year, and take 2010 off.
If you are feeling just a little too happy for a freezing cold, grey and dismally wet Sunday lunchtime, read on and prepare to be brought back down to a suitably depressing level.
Let’s start with: Mobile LTE commercial launches will slip to 2013/2014 but LTE’s role as a provider of rural broadband connectivity will gain momentum. Apparently, 2010 will be a “year of further LTE trials” but “progress towards commercial services is likely to be slow”.
Or how about: Operator app stores will struggle to compete with handset-manufacturer initiatives. Informa predicts that operators will be “unable in most cases to compete with Apple and other vendors in global reach, brand coolness and agility”.
This one is a bundle of joy as well: Mobile operators will make small steps towards a de facto functional separation in order to position themselves to address the demand for 3rd party connected devices and applications. The use of the words ’small steps’ in a prediction is always a giveaway that things are not good, as they are often used in place of phrases such as ‘going down the pan’ or ‘missing the boat’ in my experience. Informa says that unless operators “give full autonomy to wholesale units, we believe they will be too slow to succeed in shifting internal mindsets”.
I also liked: Fixed broadband operators will experiment with new business models in a bid to end the “arms race” of increasing speeds and declining prices. As Informa notes, operators have to address the need to grow revenues in saturated markets, pointing out that a major effect of declining prices and increasing bandwidth has been “the emergence of mass markets for the consumption of on-line video and music, which other players are now better placed to profit from”.
There was some good news in the predictions though, such as the continued importance of widgets in harnessing the power of the mobile web, open Internet apps being embraced by IPTV operators and an extension of coverage and reduction of costs through network sharing and outsourcing being on the cards.
Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’ll go and cheer myself up by reading some Kafka while listening to Radiohead…
Rated: 100% (2 votes)
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