The launch of Orange Bank in November 2017 begs the question as to whether other telcos should also be pushing much deeper into financial services, as new regulation and the rise of smartphones disrupt traditional banking.
This update to our ‘NFV Deployment Tracker’ series focuses on Asia-Pacific, alongside European and North American data to March 2018. Telcos in developed Asian markets have made a great start, and the region has outstripped Europe and North America in live SDN / NFV deployments – but can NFV scale to Asia as a whole?
What the leading on-demand entertainment specialists – Netflix and Spotify – will need to do the mount a serious challenge to GAFA in the top tier of Internet platforms and how telcos can help them make the online world more competitive.
Retail banks are threatened by a new breed of focused and fast digital firms – fintech – that offer cheaper and more tailored financial services. BBVA management saw this threat early and acted decisively to ensure it remained competitive. Telcos have much to learn from this.
IoT, 5G, edge computing and AI showed they were maturing as technologies at MWC 2018, but it’s harder to see yet how the first three make much money for telcos. AI has a different problem: the field is developing so fast that best practice is changing all the time. In this report we outline what we found, and a pragmatic approach for telcos to successfully harness these technologies and create value beyond connectivity.
Indoor wireless coverage is essential to many IoT and 5G use-cases, but it’s also horribly difficult to achieve. With new entrants and changing user demands the power dynamics are shifting, and operators need to make strategic decisions now to avoid losing their stake in this market.