2017 Trends

This year started with the publication of a very interesting report by researchers at the University of Oxford.

Internet access is becoming more and more available in even the most rural areas.

The digital age is a reality, and it is evolving fast. In 2014, 96% of all non-users of the Internet were in emerging markets.

In just the last couple of years, VoLTE, or Voice over Long Term Evolution, has begun to revolutionize voice service for mobile communications, and 2017 promises to be the biggest year yet for VoLTE.

During 2016 we experienced a surge in demand for higher capacity networks, fuelled by an increased uptake of cloud services, smartphone proliferation and a drive for more unified communications.

The mobile messaging landscape saw some big changes in 2016 and this evolution looks set to continue over the next 12 months.

In recent years, competition has gradually began influencing in the telecommunications sector in many developing and emerging markets across the world.

Over the past five years, we’ve seen African telecom networks make enormous strides towards providing broadband services to more of the continent’s people.

Despite the fact that technology is one aspect of our life that changes fast making it difficult to predict precisely how the future will look like, we certainly need to attempt to understand the direction where the technology is moving forward.

In 2017 in many developing and emerging markets, telcos and other service providers will be completing significant upgrades to their network architectures and infrastructures.

During 2017, the public safety industry will continue to work towards making LTE the long term answer for emergency services communication.

The telecom industry is at the forefront of leading the transformation the world is witnessing.

Everyone is talking about the mobile revolution in emerging markets, and for a good reason.

2016 proved to be a remarkable year for the telecoms industry.

In the past couple of years, three important factors have come together for FinTech: the rise of cloud computing, the ubiquity of smartphones and the ability to collect and analyse big data.

Telcos have been very cautious to date about putting the crown jewels of their business in the cloud, but in 2017, they will finally embrace cloud software to boost their operational agility.

Over the past five years, Africa has seen a sharp rise in the number of mobile phone users, accounting for 46% of the total population, making it the second largest mobile market in the world.

Connecting the unconnected continues to be a fashionable industry term, with Facebook and Google in particular grabbing media headlines last year – and no doubt throughout 2017 - for their efforts.

It used to be that writing a predictions piece was something of a retread of the previous year, with a few more advances.