The End of Telecoms History – Six Months On

It is nearly six months since I published my book “The End of Telecoms History” which made two big claims:

1.??? The growth in data usage on both fixed and mobile networks was slowing and would plateau by around 2027 “on average” across the world. Hence, networks would not need much more capacity expansion.

2.??? The data rates delivered by good broadband and 4G networks were sufficient for almost all users and applications. Hence, we did not need faster technologies.

Given that the book looks back to around 2013 and forward to 2030, then the six months since publication is only a blink of an eye. It will take a year or two before it becomes clearer whether things continue to work out as I predicted.

My observations since publication are:

·???????? The data usage levels reported in the last six months broadly track what I had predicted. If anything the slowdown is faster than I had thought[1]. Many, including Ericsson, now recognise the slow down and are revising forecasts downwards, often more than once a year. But, as mentioned, it’s still early days.

·???????? Secondary data points, such as network equipment sales, are also clearly trending in the direction my thesis would predict.

·???????? There has been a cascade of individuals and companies agreeing that the days of “exponential growth” are over and the concept of the S-curve slowdown is becoming steadily more mainstream, albeit with some significant exceptions (eg the EU and the research community).

·???????? However, the 6G community is predominantly claiming that exponential growth still exists and that we need a 10x improvement in data rates. I covered this in “The 6G Manifesto”.

There have been some criticisms and disagreements. Those that I am aware of include:

·???????? Coleago Consulting who wrote a blog[2] disagreeing with the growth slowdown. Their criticism was broadly that growth rates and absolute usage levels differed across countries and that any global averaging was flawed. I disagree and addressed this on LinkedIn[3]. The author, Stefan Zehle and I have agreed to a public debate at the ForumEurope 5G conference[4] in January which should be fun.

·???????? Key individuals at the NBN in Australia pushed back strongly against my view that 50Mbits/s was sufficient for most homes. They set out a range of applications that they believe needed more. Of these, I’d agree that high quality streaming on the Apple VisionPro does need 100Mbits/s (but very few own one of these) and that downloading games like Fortnite will take 4 hours on a 50Mbits/s link but whether this is a problem depends on the user (it can happen in the background while playing a different game…).

There are some communities that still seem not to have adjusted. In particular, the regulatory community, as far as I know, is not publicly asking whether slowing data growth removes the need for more spectrum.

My book suggested that we should now concentrate on being always-connected. While both 5G and 6G have set ubiquitous broadband as an objective, they have only ever paid lip-service to this with no concrete proposals as to how to achieve it. Beyond a new hope that satellites might help, I see a worrying lack of interest and innovation here.

Gratifyingly, it feels like “The End of Telecoms History” has changed the narrative and thinking. Before it was published few, as far as I could tell, were publicly predicting an S-curve of data usage and rapid slowing of growth (if you think I’m wrong, or hugely overstating my input, please do correct me). Now, the majority seem to be acknowledging that data growth is no longer the story – even Ericsson stated this recently, albeit with caveats[5]. It will take some time for the industry to fully internalise but that journey has at least started.

[1] Eg see https://tefficient.com/is-the-end-of-the-s-curve-in-sight/

[2] https://www.coleago.com/insights/the-end-of-telecoms-history-not-really/

[3] https://www.dhirubhai.net/pulse/national-differences-data-consumption-william-webb-aovgc/

[4] https://5gconference.eu/

[5] See https://www.ericsson.com/en/reports-and-papers/mobility-report/reports/november-2024