The global telecommunications industry was for a hundred years a slow-moving utility business that changed very little from year to year. The change from monopoly to competition, starting in the mid 1980s, increased the tempo of change, but the industry still is recognizable from what it was 35 years ago, though its products have changed.
On the other hand, the whole point of deregulation is to shift market share from incumbents to challengers, and that has happened, virtually everywhere. In many markets, and for some products, incumbents no longer are the market share leaders.
Think of how much the WAN connectivity business has changed. Three decades ago, wide area networks were built and operated by telecom companies. Today, the primary suppliers are third parties--often big end users--and new entrants, not legacy telcos.
Traffic demand also now is shaped by app providers and their data centers.
The drivers of global WAN capacity now are video content and internet applications supported by hyperscale data centers owned by major app providers. Those enterprises also build, own and operate their own global WAN networks, paid for by revenues from their app, content and device businesses.
The function of the WAN remains, but it is an internal cost of doing business for some major app, commerce or content providers. Just as important, such private WANs no longer represent as much of a WAN services revenue stream.
One way of looking at traffic flows is that traffic will flow between the hyperscale data centers operated by a relatively few firms, as well as between those data centers and users of apps hosted at those locations.
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