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• Industrial-grade collaboration involving 4K • Mobile capacity demand patterns will likely
video (eg. for remote inspection and oversight shift from busy venues and road/rail corridors, to
of aircraft engine maintenance) or augmented residential areas – often indoors. This will have
reality (AR), for instance for an architectural significant impact on network dimensioning and
“walk through” of a half-completed building, perhaps frequency choices, as well as perhaps
compared to the blueprints. offload to Wi-Fi or small cells. With rapid
outbreaks and government interventions, these
• Virtual-event technologies. While webinars changes could happen abruptly.
are commonplace, that format is not ideal for
replicating a day-long conference online, with • There is likely to be a renewed focus on policy-
all the business and social interaction around the control, as network capacity may need to be
presentations themselves. Even panel sessions protected for the most important applications
are hard to replicate well online. This is likely such as telemedicine or public-information
to be a major area for innovation in future. sources.

It is likely that each industry will need to rethink its • There will clearly be a lot of focus on
approach to collaboration and remote work within infrastructure resilience and security, if home
teams, or with clients and suppliers, or industry peers. or mobile broadband becomes ever more of a
This will involve experimentation and measurement, “life-line” for those isolated.
as organisations seek to choose the optimum approach.
At a higher level, all of these changes will also impact Clearly, the exact impacts will depend on the extent
the way in which managers and leaders coordinate their and location of the pandemic in a given country, and
businesses. Good in-person communicators will need to the responses taken by authorities. Nevertheless, it is
learn new skills, while junior staffers will likely need important that network operators consider unexpected
more responsibility. demand shifts of this type – especially as these may
sit outside the parameters for automated systems and
Behind the scenes, the IT and network departments will existing, trained, machine-learning datasets.
need to adapt as well – and perhaps outsource to service
providers more often. Other effects
After the current coronavirus epidemic subsides, there
Network capacity and demand flexibility will undoubtedly be detailed analyses of the impacts
Where pandemics result in a mass change in human on the telecom industry. However, certain factors and
movements, for example with enforced quarantines and trends can be predicted or imagined upfront – and taken
“social distancing”, we can expect knock-on impacts on into account when organisations plan their responses.
the telecoms and network infrastructure.
Some of the issues that Disruptive Analysis is
• More home-working (and home-entertainment) tracking include:
will likely drive a need for fixed broadband • General macroeconomic and financial impacts,
capacity upgrades. While some will just shift such as the potential for a global recession,
peaks around (for example more daytime work frozen bond markets, difficulty in raising new
and cloud traffic on residential broadband), there equity, and a general lack of appetite for extra
may also be a greater reliance on streaming live risk. This will likely translate into slower network
news, entertainment and online shopping in the upgrades, and perhaps some bankruptcies among
existing peak evening periods that could stretch the more fragile telcos and enterprise customers.
operators’ infrastructure.

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