Marika Iivari of Martti Ahtisaari Institute, who has been invited to the association of Academic Visitor at Imperial College London, participated in an event organized there on rethinking the future of telecoms. She focused herself on the prospected drivers for and consequences of disruptive technologies that will affect telecoms business models.
The value of telecoms innovations should according to her be evaluated in connection with the whole digital sector, and from mere communication to pervasive connectivity, and thereby also redefining the boundaries of telecoms businesses. Simply put, consumers prefer better Internet for all their services, whereas industry looks for machine-to-machine automation and very low latencies.
For this reason, the traditional measures of measuring competitiveness do not necessarily reveal how the logic of value creation, capture and sharing is changing. Examining of the new sources of competitiveness based on innovative next generation technologies and emerging business models is therefore called for. Because there are differences between countries and even regions in these, exploration of market structures is needed. The key question is how to define the changing economic potential of future businesses.
A big opportunity lies in local private mobile networks, associated with the emerging and more dynamic roles of the involved stakeholders. Fair spectrum sharing and allocation for private mobile networks should be encouraged, and support provided for the value-based reconfiguration of end-to-end business settings. Alignment of regulation, prevention of technological fragmentation, facilitation of faster deployment through appropriate incentives, and innovative public procurement are means to affect the innovation development in the telecoms sector.
More information:
Marika Iivari, Marika.Iivari[at]oulu.fi