We are at a period in the history of communications where everything is changing rapidly - from the technologies being used, to the legislation that governs it, to the business models used to make money from it.
"The key driver for these changes is convergence, and the convergence that is currently happening is not unique to South Africa. It is a global trend and therefore a global communications issue," says Andy Brauer, chief technology officer at Business Connexion.
He says there are a number of rapidly evolving telecommunications packages and telcos are now looking to provide triple-play services (voice, video and data) over the same medium. This means that we could soon see a traditional telephone line carrying not only voice, but also Internet and TV into the home via the same cable.
"The advent of high-definition TV (HDTV), which was recently launched in the UK, shows how important the broadcast aspect is becoming, while the concept of IPTV on mobile devices puts a further spin on this concept," he says.
"I think that as more services - like gaming - are added to the equation, we will see a move from triple-play to multi-play on the end-consumer side, while on the business side we will see what I refer to as `triple-work` or `multi-work services`."
Brauer says such services could be business continuity mechanisms, as opposed to disaster recovery mechanisms. They could also be seen as a move towards true information sharing as opposed to the human-Web interface: human-to-human interaction will take place via the Web, enabling, for example, two people to work on the same document.
New competition and technologies
Brauer says the recently licensed second national operator (SNO) has been fairly quiet up to now. He believes that when it makes its offerings known, it will most likely not drop prices, as this would seriously challenge the existing business cases.
"What we are likely to see is the use of their fibre infrastructure for long haul services. This would be good for the business community in terms of backup for national infrastructure, as it will provide more resilience within their business infrastructure," he says.
"From an end-user`s perspective, we are likely to see more wireless technologies, such as WiMax, being offered. As an alternate voice provider in the traditional sense, the SNO will need to compete with the mobile operators and could possibly even partner with the underserviced area licensees (USALs) to further voice to these areas."
He says that although these areas may not be densely populated and there is little or no infrastructure, there is no competition from Telkom. Providing services into these regions would stimulate business, which would lead to a growth in population densities.
He also believes triple-play services will be high on the SNO`s agenda as it seeks to acquire as much market share as possible.
Sentech has now also been given the green light to provide voice services which adds more dynamics to the traditional models.
"Broadband over powerline (BPL) is a new technology that may well impact the revenues of the incumbent. Metropolitan councils (like Tshwane) are looking at using this instead of the existing provider`s infrastructure. These are the areas where the big money is to be made and the councils are now becoming competition to Telkom.
"BPL standards should be ratified later this year, but we need to remember that this is a disruptive technology (in the sense that it is disruptive to traditional business technologies and operations). The downside is that if the power fails, everything else is lost as well."
He says another technology that may impact incumbent revenues is that of WiFi, which has gone into `mesh` mode, meaning that there is now a grid of WiFi networks which can also offer alternative connectivity, and that with 3G and WiFi both on the Orthagonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM) path, things could get interesting.
"These technologies should come together on Orthagonal Frequency Division Multiple Access (OFDMA), meaning that WiMax and 3G will converge as we reach 4G, giving users the ability to be fixed-mobile and true-mobile in the same context," he says.
"The challenge here is that we will end up with all these players competing with one another - the game will still be the same, but the rules will all have changed!"
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