The future of telecoms, displayed at Alcatel-Lucent's Executive Briefing Center in Antwerp

Leveraging the network

How do you see the telecommunications market developing?

In brief, there are three areas in the telecommunications market where money can be made: the handsets, the network, and the servers.  The telecommunications sector has transitioned from a model where service providers used to be active in all three areas, to one where they only focus on the network.  Other companies, such as Nokia and Apple, are now dominating the handset market and companies like Google and Amazon are competing in the server area.  

As a result, the telecommunications service providers will need to earn money from the network.  Our view is that they can only do so by opening up the network and enabling it for application development.  Indeed, most service providers are creating the platform on which a range of new services will be delivered.  Some of these services—or applications—they will develop themselves but others will be created by third-party application developers.  Our mission at Alcatel-Lucent is to help service providers build that platform for application enablement.  That’s the economic or business model aspect of our vision.