Product life cycles now are recognized to apply to the telecom industry as much as any other. The basic idea is that any new product goes through cycles, from development to growth and eventually maturity and then decline.
The management task in any industry is to develop new products to take the place of declining products, in a timely manner. Almost by definition, the next set of products must be large enough to replace the lost revenues driven by legacy products.
The magnitude can be glimpsed by looking at what happened to U.S. fixed network voice. Between 2000 and 2020, U.S. telcos lost 86 percent of traditional phone lines. One has to add back telco VoIP lines to measure the net loss of accounts, but telco VoIP lines are not such a big deal.
There are about 34 million VoiP accounts in service in the U.S. market, according to Statista.
Perhaps 15.7 million of those VoIP lines are sold by traditional telcos. Some 62 million are sold by new suppliers in the market, including independent VoIP suppliers and cable TV companies.
So if U.S. telcos sell 27 million switched lines, plus 15.7 million VoIP lines, all U.S. telcos sell about 32.7 million lines, roughly 17 percent of what they sold in 2000.
All that points out the magnitude of product replacement telcos and other service providers must undertake.
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