The Australian telecommunications market is
continuing to see consolidation, as traditional services are being further
commoditised and digital media companies are offering new communication
services, free or at significantly lower cost. Thanks to new video streaming
services such as Netflix, and an increased use of mobile broadband for a range
of applications, people's use of broadband has increased; however a squeeze on
margins of services such as broadband access doesn't mean that such increased
usage of telecommunications also accounts for any significant increases in
industry revenues.
The industry will still need to further transform
itself in order to be able to handle the dynamics of the market, which include
lower margins, commoditisation, new technologies and competition from outside
the traditional market. The new billion dollar companies in the digital media
are light on assets and light on staff; and their business models are based on
transactions facilitated by their software-based services and done in an
automated way by the users of their assets, using algorithms, big data, cloud
computing and datacentres.
There are plenty of new opportunities in the market.
Now that the quality of broadband access is improving – albeit still rather
slowly – new markets are opening up in healthcare, education, government
services, smart grids, smart cities, connected homes, wearable technologies,
IoT and M2M – the list goes on. Telecommunications companies should take a
leadership role in these developments but so far the key developments in these
areas come from other organisations. Telstra is an exception here, with the
leadership role it plays in the development of the e-health market in
Australia.
For the time being, however, cost-cutting, consolidation
and mergers will continue to dominate the telco industry. At the same time an
ongoing barrage of innovations, new technologies, new apps and new services
will shape the telecoms market. It is an extremely dynamic market with lots of
twists and turns, set to continue into 2016 and beyond.
National
Broadband Network - Developments and Analyses 2015
By mid-2015 over a million premises were able to
connect to the NBN – so far most of them have access to the original NBN,
three-quarters have access to FttH, the remainder to wireless and satellite
networks. The revised rollout of the so-called multi-mix technology (DSL and
HFC) will start in earnest in 2016.There still is no long-term plan for when
and how to upgrade from the older technologies to proper FttH; however the
Opposition has indicated that if it wins the next election it will revive the
FttH plan, but will take into account the circumstances that exist at that
time.
M2M and The
Internet of Things
With the NBN and LTE now well and truly underway it
is important to look at what will be the real value of this new infrastructure.
This 'Internet of Things' (M2M, Pervasive Internet
and Industrial Internet) is going to be a real game-changer. It will transform
every single sector of society and the economy and it will be out of this
environment that new businesses – and indeed new industries – will be born.
This is one of the reasons so many overseas ICT companies are increasing their
presence in Australia. The LTE will take a leadership role in the development
of M2M but the NBN is also an ideal test-bed for such developments. A great
deal of attention is being paid to cloud computing and the NBN can be viewed as
one gigantic cloud.
The number of connected M2M devices will grow to
somewhere between 25 million and 50 million by 2020.
Big Data
Publisher describes 'big data' as looking at
intelligent outcomes that can be achieved from data collaboration.
The most critical issue here is strategic management,
rather than technology. However the fact that big data has become a vital tool
in competition is forcing many companies to transform their organisations from
a company-centric approach to a customer-centric one.
Connected information management, however, can go
much further. There are many other players involved in the broader ecosystem,
and by sharing and combining relevant data sets and then analysing those large
data sets we can find new correlations that can be used to spot business
trends, assess customer behaviour, prevent diseases, combat crime and so on.
Smart Cities,
Smart Infrastructure
The development of smart cities and indeed smart countries
require vision and recognition of the fact that many of today's social,
economic and sustainability problems can only be solved with the assistance of
ICT. In many situations the ubiqueness, affordability, capacity, robustness,
security and quality necessary for this calls for fibre optic and high-speed
wireless infrastructures. This need will increase dramatically over the next 5
to 10 years as industries and whole sectors (healthcare, energy, transport,
water) carry out the process of transforming themselves in order to much better
address the challenges ahead.
Cyber Crime,
Privacy and Copyright issues
With the internet having become critical national and
international infrastructure a whole range of privacy and issues have come to
the fore in relation to the digital economy and the digital society.
Some of these issues are in relation to national and
international security and tens of billions are spent by governments using the
internet as a surveillance tool. This has led to a frenzy of activity by
governments to, on the one hand, protect their sovereignty and, on the other,
use the internet for their own security activities.
Separate to this are the commercial issues. With
internet services becoming pervasive it can be argued, rightly or wrongly, that
there are some services that people simply have to have. This is exploited by
the companies involved, with requests for a range of highly private data in
exchange for the free use of these applications and services.
For more
information see - http://mrr.cm/4ES
Report from the Same Publisher:
Iran - Telecoms, Mobile and Broadband - visit at: http://mrr.cm/4Ei
Portugal - Telecoms, IP Networks and Digital Media -
visit at: http://mrr.cm/4E5
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