The Grand Trends of 2021: New Year’s Predictions for the Telecom Industry

It will be a long time before we forget the events of 2020. It was the year in which the COVID-19 pandemic changed all of our lives, and influenced almost every industry. What was the pandemic’s impact on the telecom industry, and what can we expect in the coming months?

The 2020 pandemic altered the way we live

COVID-19 and the resulting lockdowns, have made us change the way we live. It shut us in our homes, and made us turn online. Shopping, buying groceries, ordering food, working, studying, entertaining… our lives become more digital than ever. And in times of great separation, communication became most important for our well-being, and, for that matter, to help us function at all.

An unexpected acceleration in pace of the deployment of digital innovations

The pandemic has been an unexpected catalyst in the pace of digitization. As individuals turned en masse to the Internet to carry out their daily activities, companies followed. E-commerce boomed, and so did other digital services. Communication service providers who had already invested in digital solutions were the first to win in this unprecedented situation.

While nobody expected such a shift, or such a rapid revolution, this is what happened. What telecoms need to do now is catch up with the market.

What awaits telecoms in 2021?

Digitization will get stronger and bigger. Thanks to the growing AI market, and to the expansion of 5G networks, we’ll be also welcoming 5G services and edge computing on a large scale. This will be the year in which eSIM goes mainstream, and telco companies will need to adapt to the new business model that comes with Industry 4.0. It all also means that operators will need to standardize and unify their systems. Digital sales and e-commerce will be blooming.
Communication and digital service providers will need to monitor the trends closely, and ensure that they address market needs in order to stay in business. This will of course be a little easier for the smaller players, who are swift, flexible and technologically advanced, but big operators will follow, and create worthy competition.

Would you like to discover more predictions for the telecommunication industry in the coming months? Download our free ebook “The Future is Here: Business 4.0, IoT-driven Healthcare, 5G Services and Other Predictions for the Telecom Industry in 2021” here.