ITU 03: Survey – European telcos see all-IP, converged future as inevitable

The good news for the telecoms industry is that most technology and service providers consider investing in kit for IP voice, data and video services a necessary step. The bad news is that if companies thought the last few years were uncertain, the terrain may be about to get even harder to navigate.

Those are some of the conclusions that can be drawn from new research by Yankee Group, commissioned by Cisco. The analyst house spoke to 25 incumbent and alternative operators in 16 European countries and found a move going on away from reliance on voice towards a mixed services environment.

Two-thirds said voice will make up less than half of their revenue by 2006. Around a quarter said they consider DSL a lunch pad technology for other services – it can open the door to IP telephony from the home or movies on demand, for example.

The good news for equipment makers, such as Cisco, is that 21 per cent of respondents said the kit they’ve traditionally used to supply voice services is at the end of its lifespan and 42 per cent plan “wide scale migration in the next 24 months”.

Moving to IP infrastructure generally allows lower operating costs and a greater range of services to be deployed quickly.

But while Cisco commissioned the study, it will not be the only vendor to benefit. At the ITU Telecom World 2003 show in Geneva today Nortel CEO Frank Dunn banged the same drum, claiming the industry is very much at another ‘inflection point’ and needs to invest.

Similar messages have been forthcoming from other rivals such as Juniper and Net.com and the theme that equipment providers must deliver more both to operators and directly to enterprises has been discernable.