Trends & Forecasts

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.

Africa is expected to cross 1 billion mobile subscriptions in the fourth quarter of 2016, reaching 1.02 billion by year-end, according to Ovum.

Emerging market consumers do not need “the next Facebook” or “the next Snapchat”, according to new research from mobile commerce accelerator Upstream.

Shipments of smartphones saw a 6% annual increase during Q3 2016, constituting the quickest industry growth over the past year.

India is expected to see a significant uptake in mobile subscriptions, broadband and connectivity by 2020.

​​​​India has overtaken the United States to become the world's second largest Internet market, with 333 million users, trailing China's 721 million.

Singapore-based operator Singtel is looking for startups working on solutions in the Internet of Things (IoT), big data analytics, content delivery, cybersecurity and customer experience spaces to take part in its Go Ignite innovation alliance.

Unlike Europe, where revenue in the telecom sector has been gradually declining over the last few years, Latin America’s telecom sector is one of the world’s fastest-growing markets.