The Device Revolution

Devices are revolutionizing the way telecom services are being consumed – and, in the process, they are revolutionizing the communications services provider business worldwide.

I am not sure this judgment is controversial in any way. However, if there are any skeptics, chew on these consumer-penetration statistics from the States, from a Deloitte study (cited in the V2M Digital Issue on Device Innovation):

• Text messaging is up from 71 percent of Americans in 2009 to 78 percent  in 2011;
• mobile online search is up from 30 percent of Americans in 2009 to 46 percent in 2011;
• the use of GPS for directions is soaring, from 22% of Americans in 2009 to 37 percent in 2011, and, perhaps the most important metric of the group;
• and the number of American households owning smartphones jumped from 25 percent in 2011 to 42 percent in 2011.

These benchmarks demonstrate a major behavioral change – and point the way for successive waves of change to come. The hinge for this change is the high performance, mobile device – the smartphone, the tablet.

“Smartphones allow consumers to greatly expand a phone’s functionality by downloading different applications," said Phil Asmundson, vice chairman and U.S. media & telecommunications sector leader for Deloitte. "As the costs for these types of devices, apps and the wireless services that come with them continue to fall, consumers are starting to shift their behavior, taking advantage of connectivity, performance and portability that rivals and often beats that of a laptop."

Note the verb choice in this quote from Asmundson: “consumers are starting to shift their behavior …" (Emphasis added.) The changes that follow – and the pace at which they occur – will be geometric, not arithmetic.

Print transformed the world in the 15^th and 16^th centuries. Movable type was used for the first time to print the Gutenberg Bible in the 1450s. Without the explosion in mass literacy that followed, there could not have been an Enlightenment – and what we know as the modern world would not exist, or would have been long delayed.

In terms of behavior, these powerful devices could well be to this age what movable type was to Gutenberg’s. These devices cannot work without many preceding innovations, particularly digital technology, just as movable-type printing could not have existed without basic literacy and the alphabet.

The catalyst is the decisive element in any chemical reaction. Today, the device is that catalyst.

For an informed overview of this revolution occurring all around us, please read the new V2M Digital Issue entitled, “New Device Innovation: The New Shape of Consumer Consumption." Written by V2M Editor-in-Chief Tara Seals and her colleagues, the Digital Issue is available at no charge here.

Don’t be surprised by the scope, speed and power of the revolution. Stay in touch, stay connected, stay informed. Check out V2M’s great journalism: a tool for our times.

Larry Lannon is group publisher of VIRGO ’s Communications Network, which includes Billing & OSS World , Channel Partners and V2M .