The party's over. The world's financial markets are experiencing the worst turmoil since the Great Depression of the 1930s, and the ripple effect across other industries is hitting hard in every sector, even telecommunications. The world may be in a recession, but there's more than a glimmer of hope that telecom will make it through the tough times ahead.
This is a far cry from just a year ago, particularly in the first half of 2008, when service providers were saying yes to everything from ad-driven services and a complex value chain to offering a full range of multimedia, IPTV, mobile TV and online gaming services worldwide.
But as we crossed the halfway mark of 2008, carriers began to push back from this gung-ho attitude to a much more reserved, conservative one. Still, 2008 will go down as an interesting and eventful year for telecom.
Technology and trends
In 2008, we saw the rise of cloud computing, which goes along with the emerging interest in the area of centralized computing, as opposed to distributed computing.
We're also seeing a lot of hype surrounding Long Term Evolution (LTE), a fourth-generation wireless technology that's really starting to capture people's imagination in the mobile space. I would say that 2008 was the year LTE really started being taken seriously.
You tend to find something like LTE raising its profile when the previous technology it is meant to supplant -- in this case 3G -- has become passé. In 1999, 3G was supposed to be the next huge thing, but of course that didn't happen until recently. But now that 3G has really matured across the world, everyone is looking forward to the next big thing.
Given the economic state we're in though, LTE and other new technologies may well be delayed into 2009 because providers will retrench, slow their investments and hope their strategies will pay off.
Telecom survival strategies
There's no doubt we're only on the cusp of very difficult times ahead. Right now, we're hearing about the recession, talking about it and starting to see only the beginnings of the full effects of it.