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According to a 2021 survey of more than 1,200 IT professionals at a range of communication services providers (CSPs) around the globe, telcos are confident that the recent shifts within work environments are rather permanent. More than two-thirds of these respondents believe their business customers will continue to operate with employees working from home in some shape or form indefinitely. Nearly four in 10 believe 50 percent or more of workforces will remain remote post-pandemic. Perhaps global CSPs are simply feeling a bit of hopeful optimism. After all, the race to remote work in many ways worked out pretty well for providers of communication services. And the responses global telcos made to keep up with increased and shifted demands may put them in a stronger competitive position coming out of the pandemic, whether WFH is here to stay or not. Almost universally, (99 percent) of responding CSPs experienced an increase in demand for data and network bandwidth as a direct result of reactions to COVID-19, with an average increase of 55 percent. About half witnessed an increase in demand of more than 50 to 75 percent “and a staggering 12 percent saw an increase of over 75 percent to 100 percent,” said the survey from A10 Networks. At a time when many organizations and market segments were strained or depressed, more than four in 10 telcos surveyed by A10 reported seeing a “larger pool of customers/subscribers,” and one in five added customers in a new geographic location. In turn, CSPs had to quickly expand their capabilities, as 55 percent stated that they had to scale up infrastructure across their entire networks. A similar percentage had to scale up in specific high-demand locations. A third of telcos increased headcount in response. What’s more, a full 99 percent of communication services providers stated that a transition to a more distributed (edge) network was accelerated by COVID-19, with more than half (59 percent) stating this impacted total network traffic by more than 25 to 50 percent. More than a third (37 percent) stated the impact was greater than 50 to 75 percent. Likewise, as businesses were forced to accelerate their digital transformation strat- egies, CSPs were forced to take similar steps to keep up. About half of respondents said they had invested more heavily in security technologies, as customers were forced to protect expanded attack surfaces due to remote working, and half of respondents stated plans to increase investment in security moving forward. Meanwhile, about half of telcos are accelerating their use of public cloud providers, while 56 percent report to seeing an increase in demand for online platforms such as customer service portals. Possibly the most telling data point in the survey, nearly six in 10 responding telco IT executives said that the shift toward remote working has led to enterprise customers splitting workload and traffic between traditional telcos and non-telco cloud platform providers to reduce their dependence on a single network vendor and minimize risk to service availability. So, in other words, it’s become crystal clear to global telcos that if they don’t step up to meet the changing needs of customers and subscribers, they may simply get stepped over. ‘Don’t call it a comeback’ LETTER Martin Vilaboy Editor-in-Chief martin@bekabusinessmedia.com Bruce Christian Senior Editor bruce@bekabusinessmedia.com Brady Hicks Contributing Editor brady@bekabusinessmedia.com Percy Zamora Art Director percy@bekabusinessmedia.com Rob Schubel Digital Manager rob@bekabusinessmedia.com Jen Vilaboy Ad Production Director jen@bekabusinessmedia.com Berge Kaprelian Group Publisher berge@bekabusinessmedia.com (480) 503-0770 Anthony Graffeo Publisher anthony@bekabusinessmedia.com (203) 304-8547 Nazal Parvin Associate Publisher nazal@bekabusinessmedia.com (415) 516-7053 Beka Business Media Berge Kaprelian President and CEO Corporate Headquarters 10115 E Bell Road, Suite 107 - #517 Scottsdale, Arizona 85260 Voice: 480.503.0770 Email: berge@bekabusinessmedia.com © 2021 Beka Business Media, All rights reserved. Reproduction in whole or in any form or medium without express written permission of Beka Business Media is prohibited. ChannelVision and the ChannelVision logo are trademarks of Beka Business Media 6 CHANNEL V ISION | July - August 2021