Telco 2020 – How Telcos transform for the ... - Roland Berger

Competence Center InfoCom 5
Usability and service experience – the keys to customer acceptance: Separate individual
contracts are increasingly giving way to demand for access packages that bundle broadband
connectivity for mobile phones and the Internet. As things stand, just 10% of customers buy
contracts that combine mobile and landline communication. Yet this figure is expected to rise
to 60% by 2020. In the end, customers pick the provider whose digital service suite matches
their patterns of usage as closely as possible, and that also supplies attractive handsets. Future
offerings will have to function independently from devices and network access, especially at a
time when mobile Internet is becoming increasingly important worldwide. Communication is no
longer a separate service. It has become an integral part of social networks and other e-service
ecosystems that embrace entertainment, shopping and healthcare, for example.
Telcos need to compete with the fab five: Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google and Microsoft are
spreading their tentacles and occupying more and more of the service territory. They are offering
Internet applications, their own devices and platforms on which customers can (although they
rarely do in practice) combine all their online activities – even if the service ecosystem builds
barriers to other ecosystems. In the future, customers will be willing to pay for simple, fast
access to these ecosystems. Pure-play broadband access will remain the cornerstone that even
the fab five will have to use. But given the forecast ubiquity of optical fiber networks and highspeed
wireless connections, it is increasingly being regarded as an interchangeable commodity.
As a result, price pressure is growing.