COVID-19: The Lasting Impacts on Telecom

COVID-19 has a long lasting impacts on telecom. When we think about the lasting impacts of COVID-19, we see not only some new trends but also an acceleration of trends that we all know. We’ve seen all the trends are changing the shape of telecom already. Peter Jarich, the head of GSMA Intelligence, presented recently in his keynote speech at Huawei User Group Meeting (HUGM) 2020.

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How were we thinking about telecom 2020 before the pandemic? We talked to operators throughout the world. They are focused on OpEx savings, CapEx savings, user experience, and generating new revenues. And most operators are thinking about making money. Not OpEx savings and CapEx savings aren’t important. Clearly they are very important to the bottom line. But the top line is how to improve experiences for users to engage with them better, to better sell them some of the cool stuff, some of the things that can really improve their lives. This will help operators generate new revenues with new services and come up with new technologies and new network transformations.

The old adage is you can’t save your way to growth. As operators look at growth in 2020, it is 5G, IoT, B2B or enterprise opportunity. Whether the 2020 pandemic or not, enterprise services are the new ways to generate revenues for operators. How can 5G and 5G+ generate new enterprise revenues is what operators are focused on. Peter Jarich point out “From our research data, for most operators, enterprise is a largely untapped market. For many of the major operators, the percentage of enterprise is less than 40% of their total revenue. So this means it’s a huge untapped opportunity and a new space to grow revenues. It sets the stage for what’s going to take place long term as we think about the impacts of the pandemic.”

How were we thinking about telecom 2020 after the pandemic? In a hundred operators’ survey, we asked which of the categories of enterprise services that they expect to grow most following the pandemic. The answer is cloud, 5G connectivity and private wireless. All these things again come back to this idea of connectivity and they are all incredible new revenue opportunities such as selling 5G, selling 5G networks and services, selling cloud services. On the enterprise transformation space which is important to operators, we see combination of connectivity plus services especially in terms of things like 5G and cloud. This is accelerating the trend towards using the cloud. It’s accelerating the trend towards 5G. So Cloud enterprise transformation is critical and can’t be ignored but be accelerated.

Peter Jarich mentioned ‘Every year GSMA look at the impact of mobile on the UN sustainable development goals. It’s going to more important in the long term post-pandemic. These aren’t short term impacts. These are impacts that are going to hit those developing world countries very hard. Mobile will be a very important role and definitely in the long term. The pandemic is accelerating that dynamic of how we can see the need for mobile helping out those countries.’

Beyond questions about what to do with connectivity, COVID-19 is a foundation for digital transformation. For a lot of operators, digital transformation was a big kick off a few years ago. It is recognized the need to go cloud native and to go virtualized in the network. But in some cases people have felt that that’s stalled. However, in a long term, the need for digital transformation for operators is more important than ever. We asked operators what your top network transformation priorities are from a technology perspective. We see that far outpaced number one is IT transformation. IT transformation captures more than anything that concept of digital transformation of the operators. How to leveraging those IT technologies? Not just IT transformation from back office, operations, billing systems, but IT transformation in terms of using new cloud technologies, in terms of how to leverage virtualization, how to leverage cloud and how to move to containers. But how to change network on a telecom side is much more like an IT network that can be nimble, agile, and scalable and address all of these different changes. From a telecom perspective, you are going to see that increasingly from a long term impact. That’s probably one of the biggest impacts, the need for operators to increase to accelerate that focus on digital transformation. Focus on use of IT technologies and IT transformation. That will probably be for telecom even before the pandemic. It was going to be a long term trend in post COVID-19.

Huawei Technologies Co. Ltd

This content is sponsored by Huawei.