Changing Trends in Telecommunications Industry

Abstract

The mobile telecommunication industry is one of the fastest growing and continually changing markets in the world today. The greatest achievement of wireless technology is that it has made communications possible in the most remote of places at a much lower cost and at a much lesser time to deploy. The US market is largely considered an early adopter market in the wireless technology domain. A wide variety of products are designed in US and the service providers have the opportunity of bringing these devices first to customers locally. On the voice side the US market is seen as a fairly stable and saturated market. With the sudden proliferation of data services and aligned equipment, new markets in the same geography have opened up and have created a huge opportunity to restructure the way wireless services are sold to customers. The US model has traditionally been a model where the service provider sells the equipments needed for the service on a contract basis. There are some obvious advantages and some disadvantages with this model. Businesses may assume they are using the right method to deliver services to attract and retain their customers, but in reality they may miss the part of understanding the user needs. The industries involved in this study include the wireless service provider industry, the equipment manufacture industry and the wireless chipset industry. Through this study it was found that customers are happy to stay with the current model of buying services on a monthly plan from their service provider but are not happy with the contract they need to sign during activation. It was also found that there is a need to look more closely at the current wireless service provider and handset manufacturer relationship and in some cases decouple the closed structure it is in place today. The consumers want more freedom in terms of the devices and services they want to buy. The wireless chipset manufacturers have not much of a change in role they play today. They would work almost the same way they function today to deliver the state-of-the-art chipsets that go into handsets irrespective of the changes in the relationship between the service provider and equipment manufacturer. That said they need to closely understand the changing dynamics in the product portfolio and create systems with multiple technologies that would work more seamless together. This project has helped understand various aspects of the mobile telecommunications market better from a consumer perspective.