The telecommunications industries within the sector of

information and communication technology Information and communications technology (ICT) is an extensional term for information technology (IT) that stresses the role of unified communications and the integration of telecommunications ( telephone lines and wireless signals) and computer ...

is made up of all

telecommunication Telecommunication is the transmission of information by various types of technologies over wire, radio, optical, or other electromagnetic systems. It has its origin in the desire of humans for communication over a distance greater than that ...

telephone companies A telephone company, also known as a telco, telephone service provider, or telecommunications operator, is a kind of communications service provider (CSP), more precisely a telecommunications service provider (TSP), that provides telecommunicat ...

and

internet service provider An Internet service provider (ISP) is an organization that provides services for accessing, using, or participating in the Internet. ISPs can be organized in various forms, such as commercial, community-owned, non-profit, or otherwise priva ...

s and plays a crucial role in the evolution of

mobile communication Mobile telephony is the provision of telephone services to phones which may move around freely rather than stay fixed in one location. Telephony is supposed to specifically point to a voice-only service or connection, though sometimes the l ...

s and the

information society An information society is a society where the usage, creation, distribution, manipulation and integration of information is a significant activity. Its main drivers are information and communication technologies, which have resulted in rapid inf ...

. Traditional

telephone call A telephone call is a connection over a telephone network between the called party and the calling party. First telephone call The first telephone call was made on March 10, 1876, by Alexander Graham Bell. Bell demonstrated his ability to "ta ...

s continue to be the industry's biggest revenue generator, but thanks to advances in network technology, telecom today is less about

voice The human voice consists of sound made by a human being using the vocal tract, including talking, singing, laughing, crying, screaming, shouting, humming or yelling. The human voice frequency is specifically a part of human sound producti ...

and increasingly about text (

messaging A message is a discrete unit of communication intended by the source for consumption by some recipient or group of recipients. A message may be delivered by various means, including courier, telegraphy, carrier pigeon and electronic bus. ...

email Electronic mail (email or e-mail) is a method of exchanging messages ("mail") between people using electronic devices. Email was thus conceived as the electronic ( digital) version of, or counterpart to, mail, at a time when "mail" mean ...

) and images (e.g.

video streaming Video on demand (VOD) is a media distribution system that allows users to access videos without a traditional video playback device and the constraints of a typical static broadcasting schedule. In the 20th century, broadcasting in the form of ...

High-speed internet Internet access is the ability of individuals and organizations to connect to the Internet using computer terminals, computers, and other devices; and to access services such as email and the World Wide Web. Internet access is sold by Internet ...

access Access may refer to: Companies and organizations * ACCESS (Australia), an Australian youth network * Access (credit card), a former credit card in the United Kingdom * Access Co., a Japanese software company * Access Healthcare, an Indian BPO se ...

for computer-based data applications such as broadband information services and

interactive entertainment Interactive media normally refers to products and services on digital computer-based systems which respond to the user's actions by presenting content such as text, moving image, animation, video and audio. Since its early conception, various ...

is pervasive.

Digital subscriber line Digital subscriber line (DSL; originally digital subscriber loop) is a family of technologies that are used to transmit digital data over telephone lines. In telecommunications marketing, the term DSL is widely understood to mean asymmetric dig ...

(DSL) is the main broadband telecom technology. The fastest growth comes from ( value-added) services delivered over mobile networks. Insight Research projected that telecommunications services

revenue In accounting, revenue is the total amount of income generated by the sale of goods and services related to the primary operations of the business. Commercial revenue may also be referred to as sales or as turnover. Some companies receive rev ...

worldwide would grow from $2.2

trillion ''Trillion'' is a number with two distinct definitions: *1,000,000,000,000, i.e. one million million, or (ten to the twelfth power), as defined on the short scale. This is now the meaning in both American and British English. * 1,000,000,000,00 ...

in 2015 to $2.4 trillion in 2019.

Market segmentation

Of all the

customer In sales, commerce, and economics, a customer (sometimes known as a client, buyer, or purchaser) is the recipient of a good, service, product or an idea - obtained from a seller, vendor, or supplier via a financial transaction or exchan ...

markets, residential and

small business Small businesses are types of corporations, partnerships, or sole proprietorships which have fewer employees and/or less annual revenue than a regular-sized business or corporation. Businesses are defined as "small" in terms of being able to ...

markets are the toughest. With hundreds of players in the market, competitors rely heavily on price; success rests largely on brand name strength and investment in efficient billing systems. The

corporate A corporation is an organization—usually a group of people or a company—authorized by the state to act as a single entity (a legal entity recognized by private and public law "born out of statute"; a legal person in legal context) and r ...

market remains the industry's favorite. Big corporate customers are concerned mostly about the quality and reliability of their telephone calls and data delivery while being less price-sensitive than residential customers. Multinationals, spend heavily on telecom infrastructure and premium services like high-security

private network In Internet networking, a private network is a computer network that uses a private address space of IP addresses. These addresses are commonly used for local area networks (LANs) in residential, office, and enterprise environments. Both the I ...

s and

videoconferencing Videotelephony, also known as videoconferencing and video teleconferencing, is the two-way or multipoint reception and transmission of audio signal, audio and video signals by people in different locations for Real-time, real time communication. ...

. Network connectivity can also be provided to other telecom companies by wholesaling circuits to heavy network users like internet service providers and large corporations.

Value chain

Global players

Mergers and acquisitions

Around 24,800 M&A deals have been conducted in the Telecommunication Industry with either the acquirer or the target company coming from the Telecommunications sector. In total over 5.712 bil. USD have been spent on M&A between 1985 and 2018 in this industry. There has only been one big M&A wave around 1999 and 2000. In most other industry there are three waves between 1990 and 2018. Since 1999 deal value shrunk by -90.12% and is expected to stagnate in 2018. Here is a list of the top 10 Telecommunication deals in history ranked by volume:

Recent developments

The telecommunications sector has seen a large increase in the recent years. Whereas in 2015 there were 3.3 billion active mobile broadband subscriptions worldwide, in 2020 there were around 7.7 billion. This increase was due, in part at least, to the deployment of

4G LTE In telecommunications, long-term evolution (LTE) is a standard for wireless broadband communication for mobile devices and data terminals, based on the GSM/EDGE and UMTS/HSPA standards. It improves on those standards' capacity and speed by us ...

. During the

COVID-19 pandemic The COVID-19 pandemic, also known as the coronavirus pandemic, is an ongoing global pandemic of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) caused by severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2). The novel virus was first identi ...

, telecommunications was used to track the spread of

COVID-19 Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) is a contagious disease caused by a virus, the severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2). The first known case was identified in Wuhan, China, in December 2019. The disease quick ...

and was use by

remote work Remote work, also called work from home (WFH), work from anywhere, telework, remote job, mobile work, and distance work is an employment arrangement in which employees do not commute to a central place of work, such as an office building, ware ...

ers to conduct business during the

COVID-19 lockdowns Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, a number of non-pharmaceutical interventions colloquially known as lockdowns (encompassing stay-at-home orders, curfews, quarantines, and similar societal restrictions) have been implemented in numerous countri ...

Societies

Telecommunications Industry Association The Telecommunications Industry Association (TIA) is accredited by the American National Standards Institute (ANSI) to develop voluntary, consensus-based industry standards for a wide variety of Information and Communication Technologies ( ICT) ...

IEEE Communications Society The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) is a 501(c)(3) professional association for electronic engineering and electrical engineering (and associated disciplines) with its corporate office in New York City and its operation ...

* :Telecommunications organizations

References

{{industries Telecommunications economics Industries (economics)