What are the biggest challenges faced by the telecommunication industry in the modern world?

I’m by no means an expert on the industry but I have a few observations that I would like to share with you.

I think the biggest problem being faced by the telecom industry is commoditization of their core service. The way things stand people can’t really tell the difference between the operators. The only thing that makes them choose one over the other is the price.

It does not really help that most of the work done by the industry is in the background that people don’t really notice much. Coverage is very important for a network, but a normal consumer does not really care about how many miles of fiber optic cables have been laid down. Or for that matter how many new towers have been set up (unless it is for protesting against the harmful effects of radiation, at which point they become surprisingly observant)

Another problem that I see is a lack of technological understanding. In the initial years, the telecom industry was the leader in technology and was directly responsible for many great innovations in both computer science as well as cellular networks. Today the trend of “outsourcing” everything except core business operations has left the industry a captive to several companies. For example manufacturers who will go to any lengths to sell their wares [1] or turning what were once complementary industries into competitors.

Today some of the biggest companies, like facebook, amazon and google who owe their entire existence to the groundwork done by the telecommunication industry are actively taking steps to take control. Either by laying down their own last mile fiber and failing at that [2] or by sending balloons into the sky to somehow provide connectivity ,fast on the road to failure on that one [3] and finally settling down to lay down undersea fiber optic cable to “provide better speed to their data centers” [4]

If telecom operators really understood technology they would have known that the world is fast moving towards services. It’s no longer all that important to have more speed but rather what you can do with that speed.

Many of the innovations in data centers, mobile and application services could have been led by telecom. But they were not.

This is what I feel is the greatest challenge for telecommunication companies. And I don’t really see them doing anything to address it. They do make a lot of noise about government policies and customer loyalty and what not, but never seem to spend anytime introspecting.

[1]https://www.sdxcentral.com/articles/news/ericsson-bribery-scandal-cuts-deep-surpassing-1b-penalty/2019/09/

[2]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Fiber

[3] Appropriately named project loon https://x.company/projects/loon/

[4]https://www.engadget.com/2019/11/14/google-chile-curie-undersea-cable/

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Akshat Jiwan Sharma

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