If the title of the article makes you slightly perplexed, it is just for a time. After reading couple of lines you will understand everything, be prepared to take some “food for reflection”
Not so long ago, more exactly two weeks ago, the Telecom Chamber of Ukraine held another (the third one) business game #Antigravity: a leap into the future in the foresight format. This time, #Antigravity has picked up even more steam requiring a good training of maters Serhiy Boyko (BigData UA) and Elena Lutsenko (RETN) and the players. The gameplay essence was to create a projection of the future of Ukraine’s digital industry, namely, a forecast of the telecom media market development in 2025. Absolutely all the teams were formed in advance, and everyone approximately understood before the foresight start what task they would face during that game.
Today, we will talk about the ideas generated by the most technologically advanced team. Do not be mystified by the playful name “Seductive Panda Gang”, because the players took on them a difficult task of describing intellectual and technical solutions that would be popular in 7 years among users and telecom operators/providers, well, in fact would conquer the future!
The heroic team list is really impressive: Alyona Kiseleva (iPay.ua), Alexander Serbin (Huawei Ukraine), Maxim Tsivkalyuk (DEPS), Alexander Shikov (DTEL-IX) and Dmitry Moiseyev (ITbiz) – the team leader. Those people decided to share their expertise and forecasts with you, so it is a sin not to take advantage of this. So, let’s get started!
Technologies that would be most demanded in 2025 in all life spheres were featured by Dmitry Moiseyev:
- Internet of Things (according to Mr. Moiseyev, absolutely everything will be connected to the Internet by that time: from a refrigerator to an iron).
- Blockchain (otherwise speaking – “corruption death”).
- Artificial intelligence (Mr. Moiseyev anticipates that the artificial intelligence will be able to take on some of human brain’s tasks within seven years).
- Genetic engineering (yes, human beings will always strive for immortality, and the technology will help them to succeed).
- Alternative energy.
- Personalized content.
- Bio-identification.
- Neuro-interfaces.
- Payment revolution (according to the team, the last item intercrosses two previous items: at the neural level, a connection will be established between the humans and the “system” to identify them, which in turn will allow online payments without additional devices, hmm, and this more reliable and handy than plastic cards and all existing gadgets at once).
Technologies that would be mandatorily used by telecom operators in 2025 were enumerated by Alexander Serbin:
- Cloud technologies (all and everything will be transferred to the clouds of large data centers with absolutely standard hardware).
- Multipurpose software (the unique provider equipment designed for certain features will be represented as a program code in the future).
- The Software Defined Network will be replaced by Intend Driven Network. The architecture of such a network will become more complicated, but its administration will turn out easier due to artificial intelligence.
- Fixed Mobile Convergence (mobile operators will integrate with the “fixed” ones, and fixed operators will develop mobile communications, what will result in market consolidation, where there will be large FMC players covering the entire range of user needs).
- Personalized Content (depending on the “wish list” of a certain consumer, providers will provide relevant content to satisfy the above “wants and wishes” here and there the consumer needs).
- OTT/Net Neutrality (according to Mr. Serbin, the abolishment of network neutrality, which is being seriously thought over in the US, will help to address the problem between OTT services and providers: if OTT does not agree to share, the provider will be authorized to revenge and legitimately shape traffic or degrade content quality).
- 5G (the full launch of this technology is anticipated by 2020, and it is estimated that 15% of all connections would be associated with 5G in another five years).
- IPVx (otherwise speaking – the evolution of IPV6 into 7, 8, 9 and so on …).
- BigData (even now the providers own a large array of unstructured data that they will learn in due course to transform into information → into knowledge → into actions. What end? To improve their efficiency and implement the Personalized Content technology).
- Tokenization (this issue was surely covered by Alyona Kiselyova: according to her, today. a very large percentage of subscribers go on paying for services off-line, but in the light of recent trends, there is a hope that this percentage will be reduced to the minimum by 2025).
- Business Model Changes – the team is definitely convinced that the operator’s business model would be conceptually changed. Due to growing online payments, operators after theoretical *receiving a larger subscriber base an offering it a user-friendly tool for mutual settlements* would be able to get a good deal more money from cash-back than from the usual provision of Internet access. The key goal is to retain subscribers, offering them own payment service and gaining remuneration for the intermediary between OTT and users.
And the requirements to the operator/provider’s staff in 2025 were highlighted by Alexander Shikov:
- The number of employees will decrease, and the specialization will shrink (that is to say, you can forget about “jack-of-all-trades”).
- More and more tasks will be outsourced either to single-purpose companies or directly to vendors.
- The staff will have to regularly monitor innovations and implement them as quick as possible.
- In order to increase its subscriber base, the management should be proactive.
- The implementation of new ideas will come to the recruitment of specific people for a specific project.
- The main requirement is that employees will have to keep on learning, otherwise to leave their employment.
- Most of the duties “will fall on the shoulders” of AI (financial, support and lots of other bots).
We sincerely appreciate the whole team’s bag of lifehacks and incredible work. These guys are setting the trends!
There will be even more interesting and useful, so stay tuned!
