With several of the world’s largest telecommunication companies coming out of Europe, the region has always been in the forefront in communication thus pioneering the household adoption of broadband internet. Similarly, Europe is no stranger to high capacity communication networks and their applications like VoIP. France today, for instance, has a VoIP penetration of more than 70% in its households, in comparison to only one-third of the US households using VoIP. Besides, European mobile service operators have always experimented with new service and operational models - like outsourcing network operations to Ericsson - that were then adopted by companies across the globe.

Julien Salanave, the Managing Director of IDATE speaks at the recently held eComm conference on how the European telecommunication industry will shape up in 2015. He starts the discussion by identifying six major uncertainties whose outcome will determine the future of the telecom industry in Europe. Some of the uncertainties he discusses include the likelihood of demand from every user for a uniform identify to be used across all communication channels and prevalence of an open vs. closed ecosystem for mobile communication devices. 

Based on the possible outcome of each of these uncertainties, he charts out four distinct scenarios that may come to rule the European telecom space in 2015. Two of these scenarios are named “Silent Death” and “Generative Bazaar”. He pits Silent Death, which he describes as the “Survival of the fattest” scenario against Generative Bazaar, where an open access model ultimately prevails, to see which one of these scenarios is more likely to emerge in the next few years.