Five trends for Indian telecom in 2016

Data monetisation to move away from telcos: this continues a theme from 2015, and predicts that new revenues in the industry generated from data service will flow more and more to data service and applications providers, and not to telecom operators

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Now in its fifth year, PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) has published its “Five trends for Indian telecom in 2016”–a preview of what the market may expect from one of India’s most dynamic industries of late:

1. Consolidation towards a 5+1 market: The market will settle on five private sector players, and one state-owned one. Combinations may come in the form of outright mergers, or of spectrum sharing such as recently announced by Idea and Videocon.
2. Network experience prevails over customer experience: In other words, operators will continue to focus on providing a high quality, consistent network experience offering the speeds and coverage expected by customers.  Differentiating that experience (reference net neutrality debates) is not for India, just yet.
3. Data monetisation to move away from telcos: This continues a theme from 2015, and predicts that new revenues in the industry generated from data service will flow more and more to data service and applications providers, and not to telecom operators.
4. OEMs to climb the value chain: Network technology providers are expected to do more to leverage their potential in usage analytics, packet-probing and pushing content-based offerings, all in a bid to protect their challenged revenue base.
5. More regulatory scrutiny on quality: The regulatory authorities are likely to go harder on ensuring operators keep to their commitments for providing a quality service, and doing so transparently and responsibly.

For 2016, PwC introduces a “big wish” too, dedicated this year to seeing India’s National Optical Fiber Network (NOFN) finally start to show some real, on-the-ground progress.

Have a look at the five trends for Indian telecom leaflet: http://www.pwc.in/assets/pdfs/publications/2015/five-trends-to-watch-in-indian-telecom-2016.pdf.  Have a look also at PwC’s brand new "5 trends in South East Asian telecoms", which provides interesting contrast to the India predictions: http://www.pwc.com/id/en/tice/pwc-view-indonesia-final-mid-2.pdf by considering the trends for countries such as Malaysia, Indonesia and Singapore.

Wishing you a Happy New Year!

The thoughts and opinions shared here are of the author.