In much of Southeast Asia, the notion that mobile internet access is “mature” is laughable. In fact, in many markets, the sheer volume of subscriptions still is growing, and therefore voice and text messaging revenues still are climbing.
So it has been a bit startling to argue that, despite those present favorable trends, growth in all those areas (mobile subscriptions, voice revenues, text messaging revenues, mobile internet access) eventually will reach saturation, then decline. Those discussions have come in the context of talking about 5G.
A longish story made very short, the reason 5G is coming so fast in the developing markets is that we simply have run out of ways to make more money on 4G. Specifically, 5G means support for internet of things, which means new services and connections for machines, not people.
People seemed to get the argument that, eventually, you run out of potential customers. At some point, every human who wants to buy and use all manner of mobile and communication services, already does so. And as one might inelegantly put it, consumers are not going to spend 10 times more on what service providers have to sell, in the connectivity services area.
There’s no other way to explain why 5G now is coming so fast. People seemed to get that.
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