Welcome to TELECOMVISIONS

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The aim of this site is to explore Visions of what will happen over the next five years to the global telecoms industry and its companies in the Internet Age. Martin Fransman's paper "Evolution of the telecoms industry into the Internet Age" in the Articles Zone provides an analysis of how the industry has evolved until 2000. This site is concerned with the future of the industry.

Currently, a dense fog of uncertainty hangs over this issue. For example, will the industry be dominated by a few players or will there be many contestants in specialised market niches?

Will the dominant players be the incumbents – like AT&T, BT, France Telecom, Deutsche Telekom and NTT – or new operators such as MCI Worldcom, Qwest, Level 3, Global Crossing, Vodafone AirTouch, COLT and Energis? Or will both groups coexist?

Will there be excess demand for bandwidth, bringing significant growth in revenue and profitability to telecoms operators? Or will investment in new capacity, coupled with rapid technical advance, lead to a bandwidth glut, resulting in falling revenues and profitability?

Different players are betting their futures on competing technologies; for example, optical fibre, copper cable/XDSL, coaxial cable, fixed radio access, cellular mobile and satellite. Which of these technological alternatives will emerge victorious?

Faced with uncertainty over questions such as these, players in the industry – including telecoms operators and service providers, equipment suppliers, customers, regulators, financial and journalistic analysts, investors and, last but not least, academic analysts – construct their own Visions of the future based upon their beliefs of how the forces driving the industry work.

This site is dedicated to exploring the future of the global telecoms industry and the theories, models, intuitions, hunches, gut feelings and guesses that feed alternative Visions of that future. After Defining Visions, an Industry Mapping is constructed in order to analyse the structure of the global telecoms industry in the Internet Age. In Key Questions some of the major questions regarding the future of the telecoms industry and its companies are posed and examined, broken down into fixed telecoms and mobile telecoms respectively.

The Guest Visionaries Zone with contributions from eminent analysts such as Sir Geoffrey Owen, former editor of the Financial Times, and Dr Arno Penzias, former Chief Scientist at Bell Labs and Nobel Laureate in Physics, allows you to understand the views of key industry and academic leaders.

An important feature and resource of this site is the Vision Check that allows you to compare your Visions of the future of the industry with those of leading experts in this field. The site also provides a Workshop for sharing opinions and analyses as well as Key Resources, Articles and Current Events that enable you to tackle the questions posed.

This site has been constructed on the premise that by sharing Visions and their analytical underpinnings a more rigorous understanding of this key industry in the Internet Age is possible.