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January 4, 2007

Two thousand and heaven

Happy New Year! Here are my predictions for 2007:

  • The big story will be EU regulation. Muni nets, structural separation, spectrum (de-)regulation.
  • The only thing of interest to happen in the US market will be Sprint and Clearwire launching new wireless broadband networks. Otherwise, regulatory capture continues as usual.
  • Private equity and vulture capital will start to circle telcos, looking to break them up and sweat the assets harder off a lower cost base. Several corporate jets will remain permanently in the hanger.
  • Companies adding real-time communications to the Web (presence, chat, voice, etc.) will keep Om's newsfeed busy.
  • Mobile IM will launch all over the place, but the users will generally be too busy texting each other to care until a richer presence model ("travelling", "roaming", "in a call") adds some real value (which won't happen widely until 2008/9).
  • The "hit" services will continue to be cross-media, just as with voting (TV+SMS), ads (billboards/magazines+SMS), photos (PC+camphone). "Mobile rules" will start to look anachronistic, but "mobile mandatory" will be a truism.
  • A few operators will adopt much closer exclusive alliances with single Internet portal/search players, who have the portfolio of services and media that operators can't match,
  • Telcos will be under a lot of pressure to figure out how to integrate ad-based business models into their services (IPTV, mobile TV, portal, voice & messaging). There will be lots of trials, but few successes as the details are being worked out.
  • The big money and margins will be made in South Asia and Africa, where the next generation of services, networks and payment systems grow up free from legacy concerns. Everyone else will suffer margin squeeze as markets mature.

Disclaimer: I'm an analyst, not a futurist. Caveat lector.

Posted by Martin Geddes at 11:52 AM
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» Reacting to Martin's 2007 Predictions from Realtime Community | Unified Communications
In his prediction post for 2007, Two thousand and heaven, Martin Geddes made some of the points that hit closest to home, and closest to reality. As Martin points out at the very end of his post, "Disclaimer: I’m an analyst, not a futurist. Caveat le... [Read more]

Tracked on January 8, 2007 12:18 AM