“Anxiety” is the word researchers at ABI Research use to describe the mood at MWC2019. Perhaps it would be more accurate to say connectivity providers were anxious, not the application suppliers that now are a fundamental part of the ecosystem, including suppliers of enterprise vertical market solutions.
That, in turn, largely reflects the saturation of consumer markets for mobile services, and the expectation that new enterprise use cases will drive new revenue sources in the 5G era.
It is hard to argue with that assessment, as the connectivity services market has been under pressure to change for decades already.
“There is widespread understanding in the sector that future revenue growth will come from vertical markets” (enterprise and business services) as the consumer market has nearly saturated,” ABI Research says.
Yes, there now is much hype about 5G, and hope that it will lead to discovery of big new revenue sources. The anxiety comes from the fear that this will not happen. It is not an unfounded concern.
It is not metaphor to suggest that the connectivity industry has had to replace about half
its present revenue about every decade or so since the beginning of deregulation and privatization in the 1980s and 1990s.
In 2001, about 65 percent of total consumer end user spending for all things related to communications and video services went to fixed network "voice."
In 2011, fixed network voice represented only about 28 percent of total consumer end user spending. That is easily a reduction by half.
source: Chetan Sharma
Mobility then replaced fixed network voice spending.
No comments:
Post a Comment