Telecom is one of the fastest growing industries in India. Today, India stands as the second-largest telecommunications market in the world. The government has raised the FDI cap in India from 74 percent to 100 percent.
This will help the industry to route fresh investments from overseas investors to fund the high CapEx demands of this sector, especially in areas to enhance coverage and launch new 3G and BWA services. This year has been an important one in terms of evolution of data services from 3G network to 4G-LTE. With operators investing heavily on developing LTE infrastructure, the coming year will see movement in the rolling out of LTE in India.
2014 can also be called as the year of social media, mobility, analytics, and cloud. Operators are attempting to integrate services more closely with social media platforms, and have started introducing advanced analytics through big data in order to get a 360-degree understanding of customer behavior. The major growth opportunity in the telecom sector which also presents a big challenge is that consumers are getting addicted to connectivity and speed. Greyhound Research believes the following trends will impact existing as well as future businesses and customers.
Rise in demand for setting up cloud-based data centers. Enterprises across the world have started demanding cloud providers to host their data locally to meet requirements for data. This demand is high, especially in banking and financial, telecom and government sectors and is pushing large cloud players to set up local data centers. These data centers would allow companies to offer its cloud-based platform to Indian customers who have been wary about their data residing in other countries along with providing resiliency services to let enterprises continue with their business during a disaster. In India, big MNCs have started setting these data centers that will help local players to deploy cloud based data centers.
Till now unpredictable power supply, patchy Internet connectivity, limited bandwidth, and unreliable optical fiber connectivity between different parts of the country have prevented companies from setting up data centers in the country. However these problems can now be tackled by using equipment that provide multiple sets of power, multiple bandwidth and redundant security monitoring systems to ensure reliability.
Investment in network analytics. Telecom operators can now use big data analytics to improve their reach to the audience. Telecom operators now aim to know more about their costumers and how they consume their services so they can increase average revenue per user, offer more customized services and generate higher revenues. For this operators can use a range of tools that will offer real time solutions so they can do changes in their offering at the moment that it is needed. LTE deployment in India will also increase competition; operators need to embrace these tools to get the measurements and metrics necessary to successfully manage their entire network end to end, optimize network spend, and proactively address service issues, and identify monetization opportunities.
Rescale sales force, help them sell cloud based services. While technologies, business models and computing capacity have grown in unimaginable ways during the past few decades, service-provider sales contracts, and processes have not kept pace. In today’s competitive environment, it is more important than ever to not only deliver the services that costumers want, but also to do it in a simple, frictionless way that makes it as easy and fast as possible for them to purchase exactly what they want.One of the key benefits of cloud computing is that it offers enterprises a way to cut out lengthy and unwieldy IT hardware provisioning processes. Telecom companies in India will need to capitalize on this to ensure smooth and uninterrupted execution of processes.
Investment in unified billing processes. Unified charging and billing allows data subscribers to enjoy greater transparency of their usage and spending patterns with real-time notifications to their handsets.Telecom service providers should invest in understanding data consumption patterns and accordingly offer truly customized data tariffs. Unified charging and billing portfolio will help them launch new, flexible data tariff plans across multiple consumer touch-points and survive in a highly competitive market. Telcos should acknowledge the shift in consumer as well as in enterprise trend. Both these are changing simultaneously in the emerging markets. An understanding of this shift will be beneficial for telcos in order to jump on the bandwagon.
Source: Communications Today
About The Author: Sanchit Vir Gogia is the Chief Analyst & CEO of Greyhound Research, an independent IT & Telecom Research & Advisory firm. He also serves as Founder & CEO of Greyhound Knowledge Group that operates under four brands – Greyhound Research, Greyhound Sculpt, Greyhound Technocrat and Greyhound Vivo. To read more about him, click here.