If you think BT has a hard time keeping up with customer demand and maintaining its infrastructure today, you should tune intoDial 'B' for Britain: The Story of the Landline on BBC4 tonight at 9pm, which details the first 100-odd years of the UK's telephony network, from Alexander Graham Bell returning to Britain in 1877 and wowing Queen Victoria with his newfangled device, to the nationalisation of the phone network in 1911, to the emergence of British Telecommunications Plc in 1981 and its privatisation a few years later.

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Did you know that, at the turn of the 20th century, when the first nationwide telephone networks were being built, female switchboard operators were preferred because they were cheaper to hire and were perceived as more courteous to callers? Modern telephone exchanges, of course, are even cheaper but perhaps not quite as courteous.

Did you know that, even at the end of the 1970s, the UK's telephone network didn't have enough capacity for everyone in the country to have a phone line, and so multiple customers had to share a single 'party line'?

British Telecom Group (BT) is a multinational telecommunications services company dealing in TV, fibre, fixed and mobile primarily in UK and across 180 countries globally. The company was established in 1969 and is headquartered in London, UK and has around 106,000 employees as of 2020. British Telecommunications Group plc has been the largest and oldest telecommunication service provider in the UK. The company started with landline and broadband services, gradually entered the mobile market and then expanded its horizon to television services. BT is the UK's leading provider of business broadband and business phone services. For businesses of any size, explore our services today. UK's most reliable network: Based on the RootMetrics® UK RootScore® Report: H2 (Jul-Dec) 2020. Tested at locations across the UK with the best commercially available smartphones on 4 national mobile networks across all available network types. Your experiences may vary. The RootMetrics award is not an endorsement of EE. We have the UK’s biggest fixed and mobile network –delivering supreme coverage, capacity and resilience. End-to-end management Our fully-managed service provides whatever you need, from a dedicated project management, to operations centres proactively monitoring your network.

Did you know that, way back in the 1800s, the UK's telephone networks were mostly owned by smaller local companies? They were slowly brought together by the National Telephone Company (NTC) between 1881 and 1911—but then, after it became a monopoly, it was nationalised by the coalition Labour and Liberal government and folded in under the General Post Office. Notably, the municipal telephone system in Kingston upon Hull was one of the few telephone networks not acquired by NTC and escaped nationalisation, and it lives on as KCOM/Kingston Communications/KC today.

Did you know that BT Tower in London is actually a communications tower, and was constructed in the 1960s as the centrepiece of a nationwide microwave network that would eventually give the UK enough trunk bandwidth to satisfy demand? (Though it would soon be augmented and mostly replaced by optical fibre in the 1980s.)

Eventually, of course, providing a telephone network became less of a service and more of a business, and BT was privatised in 1984. But what's next for the humble landline? Will it be winnowed by fibre-optic networks and mobile 5G, or will new DSL standards like G.fast allow those spindly copper wires to hold on a little longer?

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If you want to learn about all of these things and more, watch The Story of the Landlineon BBC4 tonight at 9pm. It'll be available on-demand from BBC iPlayer for 30 days after it airs, too.

In the mean time, you might want to read our in-depth explainer of how the Internet works.

Listing image by Hulton Archive/Getty Images

The telecommunication industry is going through a transformational phase of development – to acclimatize itself per the new technological and cloud trends. An article I had written for Microsoft blog discusses this in good detail – Digital transformation helps telcos move from perish to flourish.

At the very outset, the focus was on the Communication Technology (CT) which marked the first wave of the information era. The second phase was the internet phase which started approximately around the year 2000. The industry realigned itself around horizontal solutions during this phase. It was the time of e-commerce and portals.

After 2006, the cloud began taking shape and this marked the third phase of transformation in the telecommunication industry. Come 2019 and we are in the midst of the era of cloud, where a new world of opportunities has opened up for the carriers. It is quite evident that this era is unstoppable and there is no escape.

Related: MSP and CSP Best Practices Guide – How to Grow your Profitable Cloud Business in 2020

In addition to opportunities, the telecom companies around the world are facing a lot of challenges in this era. New technologies like the Internet of Things (IoT), augmented reality (AR), virtual reality (VR), microservices and more necessitate that telecom providers realign their business strategies and restructure themselves as per the cloud era, in terms of operations, architecture and networks as well.

Moreover, in order to gain a competitive edge, they need to focus on providing customized solutions to their customers and focus on developing long-term relationships with them.

Top 5 challenges and trends in telecommunication industry

This write-up on top 5 challenges and trends in telecom industry is an endeavour to help you stay informed. Let’s discuss the challenges faced by the telecom industry first.

Top challenges in telecommunication industry

1. Telcos have to decentralize the purchasing and decision power, both internally and externally, because of the essential agile reconfiguration of the cloud.

2. With the availability of new technologies, the variety and quality of services from telecom companies and internet service providers (ISP) are increasing, profit margins are decreasing, and the lines between telecom companies and technology vendors are blurring. Hence, telcos have to take a fresh look at the level of ICT innovation and adapt their organization to digital transformation by creating strong cross-functional interfaces and by seeking tools for maintaining organizational flexibility.

3. With millions of subscribers, a variety of new products, bundled and customized solutions, the operational support services like service configuration, order fulfillment, customer care, and billing are becoming increasingly complex. Hence, the cost of handling these operations require resources and different tools, thus, increasing the financial overhead.

4. Telecommunication providers need to upgrade their IT and connectivity infrastructure and focus on providing data and voice services that are high quality, reliable, and affordable. Security of the networks has become a major priority for the telcos and they are facing challenges with the emergence of new threats that are powered by new technologies. So, a number of operational and technical innovations are needed to meet customer expectations of complete system security from network till the device level.

5. One more challenge waiting in the wings for telcos and ISPs is the impact of Internet of Things (IoT) that is leading to explosive growth in the connected devices. This growth is generating billions and trillions of new data sources and thus, it is expected that this growth will push the data to be handled by networks to zettabytes per year.

Top trends in the telecommunication industry

1. 5G Networks – The telecom carriers are working on providing the 5G networks to spark an enormous wave of faster internet. While the technology has not yet been fully defined, carriers are proceeding with the lab and field trials in their race to stay competitive.

   The full, mass-market 5G coverage is expected by approximately 2020.

2. Secure and reliable services – Modern telecom environment offers a rich set of services that need reliable and secure authentication. The number of smartphones equipped with biometric fingerprint readers is increasing. This technology is also being used by retailers, financial institutions, government, and even schools, to verify identities.

   Other biometric mechanisms like facial or retinal recognition, are also telecom trends and are likely to pick up steam in the coming years. An increasingly large number of telecom companies are adopting biometric SIM cards for curbing crimes related to mobile phones and terrorist attacks as well.

3. Artificial Intelligence (AI) – The addition of artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities to smartphones will bring the next shift in technology, according to Huawei, in an article by ZDNet.

   AI allows smartphones to perform highly sophisticated functions such as augmented reality (remember Pokémon Go), speech recognition, indoor navigation, and even learning the daily tasks and preferences of an individual to enable digital assistants like Siri and Alexa.

   Customer service chatbots, like CenturyLink’s ‘sales assistant’, speech and voice services for customers where they can explore or buy content by speaking, traffic classification, network optimization and orchestration, and predictive network maintenance, like AT&T’s self-healing and self-learning hardware that’s powered by artificial intelligence are among some AI applications that are used by the leading players and are among the emerging trends in the telecommunication sector.

4. Internet of Things – Although mentioned above as part of challenges faced by telecom industry due to the huge amount of data that connected devices generate, but this is one major trend that will provide telcos with more opportunities in the coming years. Becoming an IoT connectivity service provider and offering Machine to Machine (M2M) devices can open up new streams of revenue for the telcos.

   Gartner predicts that there will be nearly 20 billion devices connected to the IoT by 2020 and that IoT product and service suppliers will amount to a business of $300 billion in revenue.

   As per a survey by Tata Consultancy Services (TCS), the telecom sector ranks fourth as far as spending on IoT technology is concerned. Making software-based updates to their products and services has been rated as the top business process improvement by telecom companies. Other business improvements are providing customized marketing campaigns, improving customer segmentation, and providing better service.Image Credit: Tata Consultancy Services

   IoT can be used for improving the operational efficiency with remote monitoring and management of equipment, IT infrastructure, getting better security with IoT enabled intrusion detection system and protection of remote sites by the telcos.

5. Mergers & Acquisitions – With cut-throat competition, new technological innovations disrupting the existing customer base, the year doesn’t seem to be very easy for the telecommunication sector. That’s why a number of companies are looking to partner with media and content firms, like AT&T’s proposed merger with Times Time Warner Inc.

In addition, telcos are looking to increase their offerings by partnering with OTT players for delivering content or companies that can help them provide enterprise solutions like
SD-WAN (software-defined WAN).

The telecom companies should take a more informed approach to simplification of business processes which can help them ride the digital transformation wave.

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The cloud and subscription billing complexities can be simplified with the right tools. Designed to ease management of recurring revenue businesses, RackNapempowers you to manage your business processes – billing, inventory, service delivery, marketing, sales, customer support and more through AUTOMATION- all from a single pane of glass.

What will be the top telecommunication industry trends in 2019 and beyond, per you? Let us know if there are any other telecommunication trends or challenges in the telecom industry that we should include in this article.

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