The battle for cost efficiency favors the emergence of powerful large-scale operators in emerging markets. Bharti has already taken a step in this direction with the recent takeover of Zain's African operations, transforming the company into a truly global telecom company with operations across 18 countries and a customer base of around 180 million subscribers. Orascom is an example of an emerging market operator actively participating in the consolidation process in advanced markets.
Generative Bazaar depends on widespread deployment of ultra-fast broadband with open access, which serves to accelerate the explosion of new services and applications.
Expanded access to mobile services in emerging markets fuels economic development, which in turn creates more wealth for the BoP and drives further uptake of data services in a virtuous circle. Data services uptake is also facilitated by an open innovation approach that enables application and device developments that cater to emerging market specificities.
3G networks are already expanding in China, and the number of FTTx subscribers in China is expected to top 50 million in 2012. China's 3G and FTTx rollouts by state-owned carriers are part of the government's economic stimulus plan.
Some governments are stimulating or funding open access networks to spur economic growth. Singapore, though not an an emerging market, is a country where such deliberate state intervention can be found. The government is rolling out the open access Next Generation National Broadband Network (Next Gen NBN) that will offer pervasive, ultra-high connectivity by 2015, supporting a range of next-gen services, such as high-definition video conferencing, telemedicine and immersive learning applications.
There is compelling evidence that the telecom industry is facing one of its biggest inflexion points. So the threat posed by the OTT providers should be analyzed to develop cooperative value creation for all players. The value chains of adjacent industries, driven by smarter planet initiatives, are now more open for the telco to capture a greater share of these industry value chains and deliver improved outcomes. The alternative is to see the trend continue toward lower value realization.
The complete scenario study can be found at www.ibm.com/telecom.
Nick Gurney is the global communications leader for IBM Global Business Services; Rob van den Dam is the global telecommunications industry leader within IBM's Institute for Business Value