Analyst: Smart lifespaces key to unlocking 5G revenue
September 28, 2020
By Colin Mann
Telecoms firms are being urged to resegment their market and understand what’s happening in the household in order to optimise their opportunities in the New Normal and accelerate time to new revenue.
According to research from analyst firm Omnisperience, telecoms service providers have spent billions on designing, deploying and innovating new networks such as 5G and FTTP. But as has been the case with previous network refreshes, they have failed to articulate a clear path to offset the massive CAPEX involved, with the consumer-facing proposition particularly uncertain.
In a new paper, Unlocking the emerging opportunities from smart lifespaces, advanced details of which were shared with advanced-television for a recent Euromedia magazine article, Omnisperience outlines that there is huge short-term and longer-term growth potential for ICT firms that can better address the emerging opportunity within households. However, doing so requires them to rethink their customer segmentation as well as the bundles, pricing and offers targeted at households.
“A lot’s been written about the revenue-generating potential of 5G, but many of these so-called opportunities have no proven demand and are either improbable, highly-speculative, hard to deliver, or some way off,” asserts Teresa Cottam, Omnisperience’s Chief Analyst. “Service providers need new revenue streams today but as is often the case, they’re overlooking the obvious. The New Normal has clearly revealed that the household is no longer what many ICT firms believe it to be. It’s become a different size and shape because people are living differently. It’s become a hive of business. And it’s utilising an ever-wider range of technologies. But it’s also increasingly frustrated because service providers are not adequately addressing its needs.”
Telecoms service providers have historically been bad at cross-selling and upselling to consumers, take a very narrow view of what they sell to households, and by failing to address the emerging opportunity, have handed huge revenue streams to rival ICT players.
“Failure to address the new needs of households isn’t just bad for service providers,” warns Cottam. “It’s also bad for the households themselves. They’re frustrated at having to buy technologies from dozens of suppliers and then having to try and integrate and support disparate products. Inevitably there are gaps that can be exploited by criminals in the form of cybersecurity issues, but equally when things go wrong, aren’t compatible or don’t provide the level of service the household now needs someone inside the house has to use their precious time to fix things.”
Omnisperience suggests that during lockdown, it became obvious that consumer mobile, broadband, packages, prices and service levels don’t cut it in the New Normal. Not only do households need telecoms firms to offer higher quality of service (QoS) for homeworking, running nanobusinesses from home and for high-quality entertainment services, but they also need more cloud-based services, cybersecurity, assurance and managed lifespace services. At a very basic level, mass homeworking requires ICT providers to address the gaping historic divide between B2C and B2B customers which determines which services can be offered to them. It means rethinking and refreshing bundles, pricing strategies and offers to better meet the emerging needs of smart lifespaces.