Agility will go beyond management and corporate culture and become the cornerstone for innovative approaches to the transformation strategy of telecom operators. This will enable companies to transform not only the entire IT landscape, but also its individual components or processes. An agile approach will help reduce the risks associated with massive transformations. It will help solve problems as they happen, without waiting for the accumulation of a certain critical mass. This trend will equally affect the IT infrastructure and the organization of business processes. In practice, this means that more operators will adopt a modular architecture based on microservices, as this will enable them to effectively respond to new market and user requirements, as well as significantly decrease the time to launch new products and reduce costs.

Today, clients are already accustomed to the level of service and user experience that digital companies provide them with. Therefore, they expect their interaction with the operator to be just as comfortable. It is in this area that the main vying between tech corporations and telecom operators will be seen. The former are more familiar to the younger generation who actively use digital services, so the operators will be forced to look for other ways to attract a potential client. It is highly likely that for this purpose they will create new brands to monetize new digital services and 5G. This approach allows CAC to be reduced by 70%. About half of the most successful companies exercise a completely new digital offering, and about 30% choose to merge or acquire a new digital business.

While some operators are just starting to implement 5G, others are already taking advantage of this technology. Clearly, in 2022, companies will be looking to monetize the possibilities of 5G. Mobile operators with the help of their services will strive to participate in every minute of a subscriber’s life, and fixed network operators will need to find a way to successfully compete with them in these given terms. Widespread use of services related to gaming, video streaming, AR/VR, fixed wireless access (FWA) and slicing can provide up to 10–20% growth in ARPU. In addition, operators will actively develop B2B and design new concepts for their business.

To move away from the image of a “traffic pumping company” and move closer to the image of their competitors as digital providers, operators should innovate faster and more efficiently. It is also likely that telecom companies will seek independence from IT vendors and will require higher transparency from vendors. All these processes merged with the increased demand for remote work are already challenging the usual business models. This will undoubtedly leave its mark not only on the user experience, but also on the corporate culture. Companies will use more agile tools to manage employee experience in order to become more innovative and open to new technologies and solutions.

Since the creation of an ecosystem and the development of a partner network will enable operators to optimize the value chain and find new sources of income, their importance will increase markedly in the new year. To do this, operators will need to increase the agility and transparency of their infrastructure by integrating partner applications into their own IT landscape and offering clients more partner services. Operators will also use co-branding strategies more extensively to increase their own recognition owing to a partner and thereby expand their subscriber base.