With Millenials poised to dominate the economic landscape, service providers will need to up their game to provide blazing speeds, pristine service and more and more choices. That’s the word from a newly released CommScope report based on a survey that was conducted among 4,000 Millennials and Baby Boomers in San Francisco, London, Sao Paolo and Hong Kong in early 2016.
Network operators should plan for continued capacity growth, greater flexibility, a larger array of services and corresponding billing models to address societal changes brought on by the Millennial generation, according to CommScope research into the lifestyles and spending trends of people born between 1980 and 2000.
“Millennials will represent the lion’s share of purchasing power in a few years, and since they prioritize devices and access to fast Internet, they are expected to continue to put high levels of spend towards connectivity. However, they need to be served differently than previous generations in order to meet their expectations,” Morgan Kurk, CTO at CommScope says.
Slated to represent three of every four people in the global workforce by 2025, Millennials have preferences and spending habits that directly impact telecommunications service providers and content providers, according to the report. More than 85 percent of Millennials have smart phones, and more than three quarters (77 percent) of them agreed or strongly agreed that they expect to be able to stream video wherever they are.
Millennials are willing to pay for higher levels of service. For example, half of respondents said they would pay 5 percent of their annual salary for super-fast Internet.
Other findings in the report include:
• Millennials are so accustomed to the Internet that they would rather give up plumbing, heating and air conditioning, personal transportation and cable TV before they would go without connectivity and the electricity needed to power their devices.
• Two-thirds of Millennials agreed or strongly agreed that social media is their major form of social communication, compared with one-third of Baby Boomers.
• Three-quarters of Millennials said they would like to adjust the speed of their Internet services depending on their activities — and pay accordingly.
The report concludes that networks must continue to increase in speed and capacity and need additional focus on response time (latency). “Advances and adoption of Cloud RAN, virtualization and eventually 5G technologies will likely assist in this mission,” CommScope notes.
Another basic conclusion coming from the survey is that fiber will be driven deeper toward the edge to satiate demands for higher bandwidth and improve latency. Additionally, software-defined networking (SDN) and network functions virtualization (NFV) will improve efficiency, drive capacity where it is needed, when it is needed, and generally increase network agility.