In our recent Salesforce Live: Switzerland show for telecommunications, we explored the telco industry’s relationship to past and future change, with a particular focus on 5G. Take a look at our key takeaways.
Telecommunications is always changing. Whether it’s new tech, evolving market trends, or regulatory shifts, disruption is fast, frequent, and sudden. That’s why, when it came to 2020, many were ready to adapt fast.
At our Salesforce Live: Switzerland virtual event, we explored the past, present, and future of change in telecommunications — zooming in to identify how telcos have adapted this year and which lessons are informing their future strategies.
We spoke to experts from across the sector (as well as some of our own) about everything from smart homes to cloud gaming — all packed into a late-night talk show format.
You can still watch the event on demand or enjoy some of the key takeaways below.
New disruptions, new priorities
During the show, we were joined by major European telco leader UPC, a company that’s stayed agile throughout the year’s disruption. Fabio Pellegrino, Director CIO Operations, and Bruno Schenck, Director of Digital Transformation, offered us an insight into how UPC has adapted and what their future strategy looks like.
“This year, we decided to draw the focus back onto the services we have in place. We rearranged our priorities to focus on the stability of our services, ensuring they were robust and reliable for our customers.”
But this shift in priorities hasn’t stopped UPC from pushing forward with its digitalisation strategy. It’s already thinking about its new priorities for 2021.
“We’re quickly moving onto modern technologies like cloud services,” said Fabio. “Customer behaviour changed in 2020 — they want to do more on their own, and we’re providing the technical capabilities to help them do it.”
Inevitably, 5G is high on UPC’s agenda too. “5G is the next big milestone for telcos,” explained Bruno. “Luckily, we’re already advancing a digital way of working, and we’ll be ready to make the most of it when it arrives.”
Are telcos ready for 5G?
COVID-19 isn’t a purely disruptive force — it’s also an accelerant of existing change. And for many telco providers (and the customers and industries they serve) the focus of that acceleration has been the potential of 5G to support innovation, create new revenue streams, and improve customer experiences.
Dirk Grote, Salesforce Director of Go-to-Market Telecommunications, joined us to contextualise 5G’s potential relative to how telcos have handled similar advances in the past.
“If we look back to 3G, it didn’t take off until the iPhone came out and proved its connectivity benefits. Telcos need to take a more active role in shaping 5G’s potential by thinking of exciting use cases that spark innovation and change the market.”
The good news is that the massive improvements to latency, speed, coverage, capacity, and density that 5G promises easily translates into evocative and compelling use cases across every industry. For instance:
Real-time communication between IoT devices
Remote maintenance of field equipment
Off-site operation of robotics
AR and VR-based staff training
Increased use of edge computing
It’s no surprise that telcos like UPC are already thinking about use cases like these.
“We’ve seen IoT becoming more popular over the past few years. The shift might not be as quick as what we saw with 3G, but across the next five to ten years, we’ll see some big changes.”
Monetising 5G for consumers
It wasn’t just B2B use cases that our experts focused on either. Throughout the show, we explored some compelling consumer use cases too.
We covered everything from augmented reality to content creation, but for Dirk, some use cases stood above the rest. “I think we’re going to see a big jump in smart home technology,” explained Dirk. “5G has the capability to bridge different smart home components together, as it combines all the benefits of WiFi, Zigbee, Bluetooth, and more.”
Bruno at UPC shared similar thoughts too. “With much faster connections between devices, we’ll see completely new models of self-service,” said Bruno. “Our devices will be able to ‘talk’ to each other, and ultimately make our lives much easier.”
And the most compelling use case of all? Cloud gaming.
“If telcos are looking for a way to monetise 5G for consumers, cloud gaming is a strong candidate.”
"There’s an opportunity to offer big data packages, and even bundle in hardware," Dirk explains. "This could create new revenue streams and provide entry points for new target demographics."
Watch the full show on-demand
These are just some of the key takeaways from the show — there were many more insightful conversations, including the full exclusive interview with UPC. Watch the full show on-demand to get a deeper dive into the future of the telecommunications sector.
