The growth of mobile data traffic and network demand seems absolutely unstoppable and will run away like crazy in the next couple of years. And in the swirl of all this, there’s one certainty in life for CSPs: they’ve got to provide a lot more capacity for not a lot more money. More for less – whatever next! Sounds like Moore’s Law to me (excuse the pun!).
So how do you do that? If you hope to survive this new world order of huge amounts of bandwidth on-demand, you have to severely cut your operating cost base. But as I’ve been saying about cost-cutting for years now, you have to be smart about it. For instance, if you cut back on customer service representatives or maintenance staff, you could ultimately end up losing customers.
While I’ve been espousing the concept of the “lean operator” for a while, I’m now hearing from service provider CIOs that there’s no longer any debate about whether it’s advantageous to become lean; it’s moved from if we’re going to do this to when, how and how fast.
Against a wall
With total telecom revenues forecast to increase by less than 2% globally in 2010, it’s clear that many markets around the world are just barely holding it together while others are actually in decline. CSPs that are seeing their fixed line markets rapidly shrinking and mobile services barely hobbling along need to take drastic measures to stay afloat. Reducing operating costs, automating processes and anything else they can do to take costs out of the business, without sacrificing the ability to offer future services such as 4G, are critical to the delicate balancing act they all face.
Keith Willetts is chairman and CEO of TM Forum
This article originally appeared on TM Forum’s Inside Leadership newsletter