Synopsis

After two years of navel-gazing and hoping for better times it is beginning to dawn on many telcos that things are not going to improve in the near future. Telcos are bracing themselves for lower call charges and no significant new income from mobile data services for several years to come. The latest area that these companies are investigating is that of ‘network outsourcing’ and there are certainly some interesting elements to this. I am on record, as far back as the late 1980s, with a prediction that vendors and telcos will move closer together. Furthermore, I predict that network outsourcing will eventually force structural separation – with the vendors running these networks they will become shared networks. 3G might be the first real challenge to this sharing philosophy. This report was archived in March 2005.