Comm. Smart Cities and IoT supplement Smart Cities and IoT | Seite 28

smart views

IoT offers the telco industry a
new lease of life
Times are changing in the telecom industry. Over the course of the past few years, we have
witnessed the transformation of the business model of telcos from a usage-based model
that generates revenues in exchange for the usage of minutes and text messages, towards a
more diversified business model for which data is an important pillar

T

he emergence of this data-centric
model has had a negative impact
on the industry. Operators are
suffering from the downward pressure that
over-the-top (OTT) applications are imposing on international calling and messaging
revenues; two of the major contributors
of cash for operators. These OTT applications, in addition to the fierce competition
in many telecom markets have created the
need for a lifeline for operators.
This lifeline appears to have come in
the form of the Internet of Things (IoT). The
emergence of IoT has transformed telcos
from mere providers of telecommunication
services to providers of an infrastructure
that connects a massive number of
devices across every imaginable platform.
What further positions IoT as a golden
opportunity for telcos is the nature of these
services, which affects the daily lives of
regular customers, the huge potential IoT
services have, and the fact the future outlook shows clearly that connected devices
will become the new norm; rendering traditional non-connected devices obsolete in
years to come.
What drives IoT even further and boosts
its adoption rate is the application of such
technologies in smart city initiatives. Such
initiatives are picking up in our region,
the latest of these introductions being in
Jordan, where the Ministry of Communications and Information Technology (MoICT)

Mohammed Al Shawwa is research
manager at Arab Advisors Group

and the Greater Amman Municipality
(GAM) signed an agreement in August to
collaborate in forming a transformational
strategy for the capital, and launching
initiatives and projects that seek to turn
Amman into a smart city.
Regional telecom operators have
not only recognised this trend, but have
taken it a step further, and have actually
started to take steps towards expanding
their role from being just the providers of
infrastructure, to being direct providers of
IoT services encompassing surveillance
and security, tracking, near field communications (NFC), and other applications.
Operators’ introduction of these services
has been driven by slowing rates of growth
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in subscriptions, due to the majority of the
region’s markets approaching telecom
service saturation.
By mid-2014, 14 operators in the region
had begun offering tracking services as
part of their portfolio, while three had
started providing surveillance and security
services. Additionally, there were 19 operators that offered dedicated M2M SIM
cards to their customers. These numbers
show that the trend is gaining traction in
the region, and indicates that operators
are acknowledging H[\ܝ[