Successful Business Leadership

By Alan K Rudi

The telecommunications industry delivers voice, data, graphics and video at increasing speeds via wire-line phone communications, wireless communications, cable, and satellite distribution of content. During the 1990s, the telecommunications industry experienced rapid growth and investment in transmission capacity, eventually causing supply to exceed demand, which then resulted in significant reductions in prices. The telecommunications industry, consequently, has been consolidating, also due to increased competition from the technologies that eroded the traditional fixed-line analog telephone. Wireless voice and data, Voice over Internet Protocol or VoIP, and cable technologies, however, have provided new digital services that provide a more efficient use of telecommunication networks.

Verizon Wireless, to describe the industry, says “While the telecommunications industry is more than 100 years old, the industry today finds itself at the beginning of a new communications revolution. Technology is radically transforming the industry:

• More than 40% of long distance telephone use and more than 33% of local telephone use has been supplanted by new technologies.

• By 2004 the number of long distance calls made over wireless networks exceeded those made over wire-line networks.

• More than 180 million Americans have wireless phones. Approximately one in five use their mobile phones as their main communications device.

• Instant messages, which already outnumber e-mails, are not only becoming the principal means of communications for young people, but have evolved beyond text to voice and video.

• The mega-trends in telecommunications – the shifts from analog to digital technology, from wired to wireless platforms, and from narrowband to broadband services – have fundamentally changed the way people communicate. This is a social phenomenon that is already shaping the telecommunications industry of the future. Around the world, traditional telephone companies are evolving into providers of full-service communications networks that deliver high-speed, mobile connectivity to customers wherever they are.” The Economist referred to these changes as “the death of distance.”

Motorola indicates the following technology research plans:

• “The Internet age is providing tremendous flexibility over how, when and where users interact with entertainment and information. Many mobile phones, PDA’s, music players, automobiles and personal computers can create, play, send and receive digital information on-demand.

• Even more exciting, users can now record media on one device, transfer the content to another and consume it on yet a third. This freedom is placing the user in a new area of personalized mobile media, one in which the world’s content is wrapped around their interests and desires.

• However, the technologies we use today to interact with this digital content are still in their earliest stages of development. Truth is, we are just beginning to tap into the freedoms of sharing, consuming and creating content.

• The ultimate goal is to have technologies that work on behalf of the user by discreetly and unobtrusively gathering information based on awareness of the user’s preferences, situation and choice of device and then delivering relevant and useful content, services and applications.

• Motorola’s research in personalization technologies therefore focuses on three primary areas: user interaction personalization, content personalization, and applications and service personalization; to ensure that a user can always experience their preferred interaction behavior with a device, application or service, that the appropriate content is discovered and delivered and that service providers can tailor their products and services to meet the needs of their customers.

• And in the future, technologies will enable people to share and socialize around their content with family, friends and colleagues from multiple locations. Individuals will be able to view sporting events, television shows and movies as well as play games or listen to music with other connected users. Social-TV and collaborative mobile gaming, as two examples, will re-create some of the aspects of shared experiences virtually, through the convergence of home media, communications and computing.”