In a keynote speech to the Total Telecom Finance Summit in London, Joe Gallagher warned that – with the advance of 4G - opportunities for players in the sector were huge, with analysts expecting traffic per smartphone to increase 17 times by 2016.
He said that, in order to be successful market players in 2020, many telcos will need to change their business models now - otherwise many of them will “run the danger of ending up as dinosaurs in the Natural History Museum”.
Joe Gallagher told the summit “The big challenge for telcos is how to understand their customers better and develop a close relationship with them, but to do so in an industrialised way. Many of us are overwhelmed with the amount of data and the advance of technology, and the security of that data will be increasingly important. My advice is be brave in how you invest, be brave in how you collaborate and be brave in how you hire.
“At the moment there is too much fighting with each other going on in the industry, too much protecting individual pieces of the pie. What the industry needs is to have more profitable conversations with each other. Operators need to talk with application providers and vice versa, because both sides need each other. The same goes for the interaction with government and regulators. Operators too often go to the regulator as individuals. Coming together as an industry will give telcos the fire power to grasp all that opportunity.”