Top 8 Technological Trends Shaping The Telecom Industry In 2022
The modern-day telecom industry is facing a broad landscape of significant business challenges. Over the past few years, the industry had witnessed a heavy decline of revenue streams in core areas like voice and text messaging along with severe competition from Over-the-Top service providers.
To stay competitive in 2022, the telecom industry is focused to undergo a digital transformation. They are leveraging technologies such as Mobile Edge Computing (MEC), IoT, and 5G to recover from the COVID-19 crisis and boldly position themselves in the future. Their services need to be customer-centric, improve efficiency, and add high-value margins by gradually moving from traditional services.
Just as cloud computing has changed the world of data, it is now changing the way the telecom industry operates. Many organizations hence have adopted cloud-hosted telephony solutions. The cloud streamlines the delivery of data and voice and enables the organization to have a single supplier for their voice and data. The new wave of digitalization is indeed offering new prospects of growth, increasing innovation, and opportunities for communication services.
How the Telecom Industry is Leveraging Digital Transformation?
Telecom industries are going under massive structural change. They are turning their customer channels, content, and communication services digital, resulting in a whole new ecosystem of value, interconnected market, and technology shift. The providers are trying to adopt high-performing networks to provide what customers need and want in this digital era. Here are the top 8 technological trends that are causing a dramatic change in the telecom industry.
- 5G network – The network of Today and Tomorrow
There are 3 billion internet users around the globe. Billions of these users prefer smartphones as their primary internet access point. With smartphones now helping consumers manage important tasks in their lives, the consumers are looking for high-capacity networks that promise faster access to applications and richer services. This can be enabled by 5G and wireless broadband, allowing 100 times faster data transfer than 4G, high speed, and low latency.
Connections to 5G networks worldwide are on track to reach 1.34 billion in 2022 according to predictions from a CCS Insight report. Telecoms are already using 5G applications and IoT devices to target industry verticals. The Healthcare sector is using telemedicine as a cost-effective and timely means of delivering diagnoses and treatments to the medical staff and patients. Connected cars are improvising the means of transportation and traffic infrastructure treatment. The education sector is using e-learning as the world settles for the new normal due to the Covid-19 situation.
Telecoms are expanding into all sorts of sectors by automating online customers. Its practical applications extend to industries such as transportation, medicine, agriculture, public services, etc. 5G network, with its whole set of technologies, is coming together to make this telecommunications bigger and better.
- WiFi 6
WiFi 6 can be defined as a WiFi network with an extended range that delivers better network performance, connects more devices, and provides faster communications. With additional technologies, it can increase network capacity, reduce latency and provide multiple opportunities for increasing savings and revenues.
Telecom operators can leverage WiFi 6 for developing new ways to optimize traffic across access networks. While benefiting fields of entertainment, telemedicine, remote employment, and education, it will also help regions where reaching fiber is prohibitively expensive.
Moreover, when merged with 5G technology, WiFi 6 will provide enhanced signal strength to enable IoT deployment and support always-on devices. It minimizes resource congestion within high-capacity networks to allow seamless data transfer of data between IoT devices.
- Artificial Intelligence
Telecommunication businesses stand to benefit greatly from developments in artificial intelligence. They are already using AI technology such as virtual assistants, chatbots, and AI tools to personalize user experience and improve customer satisfaction. It has an unmatched ability to process and analyze an enormous amount of data without risking security.
The number of operators investing in AI systems to improve their infrastructure is expected to grow to 70% in 2025. Artificial intelligence provides new ways to optimize network maintenance, predictive maintenance, and customer service costs. It allows operators to prepare personalized offers for their B2C and B2B customers.
AI also detects problems in the network, allows self-healing, and protects networks from any fraudulent activities. It also helps operators to monitor the start of equipments and anticipate failure based on patterns. In short, AI will enable better root cause analysis to efficiently deal with emerging hardware issues.
- Internet of Things
The Internet of Things has transformed the roles of telecom service providers in enabling communication between people and devices. The adoption of IoT helps the telecom industry to monitor base stations and data centers remotely. This ensures minimal downtime for the network, enhances business procedures, and generates more revenue.
Telecom industries are developing innovative methods and applications to monetize IoT solutions. They can benefit from these emerging technologies and reposition them as IoT leaders, offering services beyond network connectivity. CSPs can also explore new opportunities and develop an extensive array of services for a vast range of industries, from manufacturing to healthcare.
Berg Insight, a dedicated IoT analyst company, predicts there will be 4.15 billion IoT devices connected to cellular networks globally by 2024, which means vast opportunities for telecom operators. One of the most promising niches is IoT in Home automation that provides exceptional mobile and network services to smart home mobile apps and real-time monitoring systems.
- Big Data
IoT is enabling telecom companies to acquire voluminous data, creating pools of information with the help of IoT sensors in mobile devices and apps. Hence they need to ensure that their network can move huge amounts of data efficiently and continue to support new technologies.
Telecom industries can use the collected data to generate crucial business insights and understand customer usage patterns. Ultimately the data can be utilized to improve customer service, evaluate new products as well as monitor and optimize the network. Big data help companies to build stronger businesses and use it to their competitive advantage.
- RPA
The telecommunication industry has one of the highest adoption rates for RPA technology. It offers high levels of scalability and agility as it takes over the repetitive and rule-based tasks or processes such as responding to customer queries, report generation, price tracking, etc, and completing them very accurately.
It provides the company with the right power and tools to easily manage back-office work such as maintaining data integrity and security, employee salaries, marketing, and advertising, and Hardware & software costs.
This gives time to employees to work on rather crucial tasks, develop deeper customer relationships, increase operational efficiency, and troubleshoot the delays in the service delivery to the customer.
- Cloud Computing
The telecom cloud market was valued at $25.33B in 2020 and is projected to reach $74.36B by 2026, according to the Mordor Intelligence report. So in the next few years, we are all going to witness a massive shift of communication service providers (CSPs) to the cloud.
Most telecom providers rely on a large computing infrastructure to deliver a diverse set of applications, manage data, and bill services. Migrating to the cloud reduces internal computing resource needs as well as the internal cost and increases revenue streams.
The pay-per-use service model helps telecoms to introduce new services, reduce the cost of the service, and work more effectively as per the market demands. By adopting cloud technology, telecom industries can switch important business functions to the cloud and benefit from its efficiency. single-product telcos can also leverage the cloud to grow their service portfolio and expand overseas at the speed of today’s market requirements, just like Lebara started doing back in 2014.
- Cyber Security
The telecommunication sector is one of the most vulnerable sectors when it comes to cybersecurity. With telecom companies having large customer bases, there are abundant opportunities for malicious attacks to gain unauthorized access to their data.
When a major telecom service provider infrastructure is under attack, the consequence could potentially affect a whole country, businesses, consumers, and the government agency. It also has major ramifications over the telecom brand’s reputation and trustworthiness.
By adopting a holistic approach such as cyber security mesh, the telecom providers are better able to detect threats, take up prevention measures, and support resilience when attacked. The mesh takes a more modular approach instead of securing a single IT perimeter as networks do not have physical borders.
Soon cybersecurity mesh will emerge as a mainstream approach as it adheres to the zero-trust network concept. Meaning, any connection used to extract data will be considered unreliable until the security protocol verifies it. Moreover, the mesh promises to treat all the data systems and equipment similarly and securely, irrespective of their location within or outside of the network.
How iLink Digital helps telecoms to deliver the right benefits
More and more people are turning to telecommunication companies to keep them connected with diverse, global networks and provide the fastest, most affordable, cutting-edge services. Yet many telecommunication providers are burdened with rapid growth, managing voluminous data, controlling cost, and trying to increase business agility.
iLink Digital can identify these pain points that pose significant challenges in delivering services to customers and tweak solutions accordingly. We help telecommunication providers to transform operational processes, achieve a high level of organizational growth, and enhance the quality of their offerings.
Learn more about our services.
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