From connected cars and smart homes to wearable devices and smart cities, internet of things is transforming the world around us and paving its way to becoming internet of everything. The IoT revolution, also known as the fourth industrial revolution would change the way humans interact with machines and, in fact, lead the way to a hi-tech machine-to-machine interaction. Shortly, almost every device around us would be connected to the internet, collecting and exchanging data with other devices on the cloud. A research report by Gartner even stated that there would be more than 21 billion devices connected to the internet by the end of 2020.
With the connected devices booming and fuelling the internet market, the consumption of data has seen a radical increase. The TelCos are fine-tuning their strategies and data services to keep in sync with the changing behavior of the consumer. Not just that, the network providers are also revisiting their infrastructure, partnerships and business models to stay a step ahead of the competitors in the next generation of smart devices. Cutting to the chase, the advent of the internet of things is changing the way telecommunication industry functions and would have a huge impact on it.
In order to provide tailored consumer applications, telecom industries can be seen capitalizing on their infrastructure. Faster adoption of cloud technologies would be seen by many companies to deliver impeccable network, platform and solution functionalities. There is a wide variety of IoT use cases and that’s the reason why one-size-fits-all approach would not be applicable in this technologically advanced world. New IoT applications are being rolled out every now and then and the mobile network operators would have to deliver the highest-quality functionalities for the network to connect machines to machines uninterruptedly. The organizations would have to ensure that they have a robust cloud infrastructure that is flexible and agile to acclimatize to the new application scalability and deployment in the world of connected devices. They would have to provide uninterrupted network facilities without any drops at the right time and at the right speed as per the need of the application.
Adopting the cloud technologies is critical for the mobile network operators on the data side. The companies are offering innovative pricing models and novel value propositions to meet the preferences of the consumers. Communication service providers (CSPs) would be adopting a more data-centric approach that would enable the smart devices to stay connected with the internet for without any interruption. Moreover, the service providers would also monetize their data and boost profitability by providing data services that would provide full support for the upcoming new devices. The telecom companies would have to invest more resources into providing the highest quality of network in terms of data consumption. A consistent service across different devices would be the key to success in the connected world.
The telecommunication industry would be spending more resources in delivering data network as per the data demand for different use cases. While faster data network would be required for connecting cars and other things, a low bandwidth network would work just fine in the use case of smart metering. Low-power WAN networks aka LP-WAN such as Sigfox or LoRa are being rolled out by some of the leading mobile operators to ensure smooth working of the smart devices and applications that require low power consumption and can work perfectly in low bandwidth.
Internet of Things would drive the TelCos to partner with platform providers to get tailored platforms for their needs. IoT requires data to be stored, processed, managed, aggregated and shared in an effective manner and the telecom companies would partner with platform providers to perform the needful task while reducing the operational expense as well. Hiring best cloud software talent for platform management may pose several challenges like lack of experience in cloud platform operations or cloud development. Keeping these challenges in mind while needing to offer platform solutions would impacting the telecom industry and more TelCos would be seen partnering with platform providers instead of finding their own platform solutions.
In a nutshell, the impact of the internet of things on the telecom industry is huge. The TelCos would be seen adapting to the changing network usage and providing services that would benefit the customers. Monetization of data, better cloud infrastructure, an adaptable data network for the different use case, and partnering with platform providers would be some of the changes that would be visible in the telecommunications industry in the coming years.
About the Author: Ankit Gupta heads the digital marketing department at ExportersIndia.com. Owing to his passion for his profession, Ankit keeps a keen eye on the technological advancements going on in the digital world. To know more about Ankit and read more of his blog posts, you can follow him on Google+, LinkedIn, and Twitter.