New version of the book that changes everything - "The End of Telecoms History"

The original version of “The End of Telecoms History” was published in June 2024. It had widespread interest, selling some 2,000 copies in its first year and gaining a much wider audience through major papers in IEEE Spectrum and elsewhere, conference discussions, journalistic coverage and much more.

That led to very welcome debate, discussion and criticism when many points were raised. These included:

• Whether increases in the population or the increased percentage of the population that were digital native over time would drive some “residual” level of growth.
• Whether the absolute amounts of data growth would remain large, even as the percentage amounts fell, since a small percentage of a large number is similar to a large percentage of a small number.
• Whether there were applications on fixed networks that demanded data rates above the estimates of the sufficient level.
• Whether all countries would tend to the same levels of absolute use per person per month, and hence some had a lot of “catching up” to do or whether they would all plateau about the same time but at different absolute levels, or would they plateau at different times and at different levels.
• The previous edition was very consumer cellular-centric, in part because this was where many of the key issues lay, but there are significant issues in other parts of the telecom world that also need to be addressed at greater depth.
• The initial edition was geographically focused on the situation in the U.K., the U.S. and the EU while there are many interesting telecom issues that are unique to other parts of the world and particularly the developing portion of the world.  

A new edition provides a chance to address these very valid points and to refine and add to the depth of the initial edition. I'm also delighted that it provided an opportunity to add a co-author – Dennis Roberson. Dennis provided much support and input for the first edition and his increased contribution as a co-author has hugely improved the quality of this second edition. We do not agree on every point in the book but share the same thinking around the core thesis.

The year since publication has also, of course, provided more evidence on mobile data usage. The first edition predicted that mobile data growth rates would fall by 5% a year. The 2023 global average was 20%, now that 2025 has arrived the growth numbers for 2024 are being published and allow a check to see whether they have fallen to 15%. To avoid suspense the answer, at the time of publication, was that they had. In fact, they had fallen by almost precisely 5% to 15%, continuing the extremely close tracking of actual outcomes to the 2016 prediction made. There were a few exceptions, which were all greater falls than predicted – the UK to 7.2%, Germany to 5% and China to near-flat growth.

The trend on falling data growth rates was very strong at the time the first edition was written. It is even more so now. This has not prevented many readers saying that they still believed that there would be something that would come along that would ignite growth, even if they could not identify what it was. Often, they said “something will come along, it always does”. History tells us only one “thing” of significance from a data usage perspective came along, namely, the use of the mobile device to connect to the Internet, facilitated by the compelling user interface and structure of iPhone ecosystem.  This in turn was coupled with the deployment of 4G that unleased the power of the Internet and indeed many years of research and development across the industry. This was visible in 2007, and nothing new of data rate significance has occurred in the 18 years since. We discuss this in considerable detail in this new edition of the book.

More is now known about AI and its potential impact on telecoms network, both as a consumer of network capacity and as an enabled of more efficient networks. Therefore, we have significantly and appropriately expanded this section in the book.  There are a variety of other important trends that we have added to the book as well including novel new interfaces being explored, telecom use in non-commercial applications like the military and public safety, emerging applications like the ISAC (Integrated Sensing And Communications) that will be important to watch, the growing impact of Non-Geostationary Orbit (NGO) satellite systems (a telecoms sector whose history has not yet come to an end)  and many other interesting areas.  Finally, we have expanded our treatment of the impact of this significant change to the fundamental belief structure around the telecom industry to Academia, Governments including Telecom Regulators, and the Telecom Operators and the companies that provide the infrastructure to support them.

The result of addressing all these points is a much more substantial and hopefully persuasive text. The book is now twice as long as the first edition and much better referenced, evidenced and informative. We believe it is a very substantial improvement on the first edition.

In essence, the thesis in this book, that we have reached the end of telecoms history, has not only survived robust critique, but it has also grown stronger through the required thoughtful response to the critiques and with the advent of more data. Though still not popular in some quarters, it is rapidly becoming the mainstream view in 2025.

Available on Amazon in paperback, hardback, Kinddle and audiobook formats. Enjoy. And all comments very welcome.