Long Live the Telecom Operator

The telecom operators as we know them today are soon going to be extinct. I am sure you will ask 'How Soon?'. Well just wait a few more years. I am quite sure that major changes will happen before 2025. Why do I think so? Let us get into that, but not straight away! I have a few interesting stories to tell first!

A Vision Far into Future

Corning came up with this video of a potential future in 2011. This 5 min 32 sec video was far ahead of its time. And I do not mean in terms of Corning's abilities to produce the glass products they showcased in the video, I guess they were quite capable of producing them even in 2011. The missing elements were on the Telecom and Cloud side of the house! The vision mesmerized me and if you have not seen this video yet, I suggest you do it now. They came up with an expanded vision in 2012. But I would say that they were more than 10 years ahead of their time!

They had a follow up symposium in 2015, where they showcased some of the technologies that had already come up between 2011 and 2015. If you have a look at this video, you will be thrilled with the progress that we made nearly 6 years back. Yes! six more years have passed since then and a lot has changed. These recent changes are pushing us closer to the inflexion point. I believe next three years will be the time when the Telecom Operators as we know them will be no more! As they work more to get into the 5G & Cloud business, they will transform and morph and we will see completely new Avatars. Let us now look at what has been happening in the recent past that will be pushing us over the line.

Always connected PC is here now!

With 4G and Wi-Fi available for people in various "work centers", a new culture of nomadic professionals have some into fore. These people want a PC that has a battery life that could last more than a day and provides seamless access to their content on "Cloud", irrespective of whether they are in office, at customer premises or a waiting at a Café for the next meeting. We initially saw the increased use of 4G dongles that would create a hotspot for the PCs when the PC did not support 4G directly. Now we have first PCs that support 5G without any need for a dongle and have a suitable battery life! Look at the video above to get a peek at the future.

RISC & Mobile Processors win the battle

The longer battery life required the PC industry to think beyond the feature rich and power hungry processors. The ever increasing capacity and speed of the mobile processors and their ability to handle complex graphics on tablet sized screens opened up new possibilities. With the 5G always connected PCs, the RISC based mobile processors have come to fore. Have a look at the video above to get a feel of why the mobile processors are the future of PC industry too. One important statement from the video is, "No longer tell the difference between local storage or remote storage". While this alludes to great processing capacity and integrated connectivity offered by the mobile processors, it also assumes a cloud platform that is available at the very edge of the network.

Apple is moving from Intel to ARM

A seamless experience across all devices is something we all need. We are not there yet, with apps for phone not available on PCs and vice versa. Web apps solved some problems but not all. Apple seems to have taken a step in the direction where they can afford to unify user experience regardless of the device. And the change to ARM is a step in making user experience independent of device they log-in from.

Future is Glass, Cloud and Connectivity

Glass, yes, any glass that can be changed into a touch enabled display will become the default user interface. The biometric authentication based on facial recognition is really advanced already, so as long as you have high speed connectivity, you can login from anywhere. And if your data is stored nearby and processing is completed in a compute location that is near to you, I mean in the "edge" cloud, you may never need to chug along your personal devices. Imagine travelling to a hotel, or a different office and using any glass surface for signing in and customizing your experiences instantly.

Connectivity will be simplified

The digitization has been accelerated by Covid-19. Many organizations are moving into cloud: hosted, hybrid or public cloud. The users do not care about the type of connectivity; they only care about the application performance.

And to provide them the experience, we only need two types of connectivity: User to Data center (Just one hop for all the data and compute that resides at the Edge) and Data Center to Data Center (multi hop connection to an app that resides at a remote data center). The work loads will be dynamically scaled between data centers as per varying user demand.

What will be the role of the Telecom Operators?

They could choose to play only in connectivity business. Then they will be in the danger of getting trivialized. Retail demand will just be limited to the edge of the network and the bulk demand will be from the Data Center operators or Content players. They will get squeezed for every ounce of margin or in some cases be bought over as captive networks.

However, I believe that majority will choose to play a more active role in the edge data center ecosystem. They will still retain their customers through the last mile connectivity and will have a fair chance to compete with the Big Cloud / Content Players to become the conduit for applications and experiences.

The one who will own the user experience will be the bigger player. I am hoping that the Telecom Operators will grab this opportunity.

What are your thoughts? What will happen by 2025? Or is it too early to say?

Note: The opinions expressed in this article are my personal opinions and have no connection to my present or previous employments.