On the cover of the annual Top 10 predictions for the telecoms media and digital services sector in 2018, Analysys Mason Research’s managing director Fiona Glennon commented that:
- Specialist MVNOs will continue to surprise the IoT market by signing major deals.
- Revenue growth from new enterprise services will offset losses in traditional enterprise revenue.
- Digital transformation will shift from offering new digital services to transforming labor costs in established networks.
- Operators that provide digital methods for customer acquisition and support will win market share from those that lag.
- Service-specific and unlimited data tariffs will win out over volume-based pricing as the foundation for consumer mobile services.
- Growth in consumer spending on OTT video services will outpace traditional pay-TV spending in 2018.
- Operators will deploy Alexa-like AI techniques to engage customers in a more-digital manner.
- A small number of 5G New Radio (NR) trials will start in 2018, but 90% of operators will wait until after 2020.
- The mainstream telecoms market is embracing virtual networks. By 2018, more than $6 billion in capex will have shifted to virtualized and cloud-based networks; this shift will grow to more than $50 billion in 2022.
- Operators will begin to deploy NGPON-2 as a converged infrastructure to support 5G, FTTP and enterprise services.
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