Down swing of the economy leads to:
- the devaluation of assets and an increase in the unemployment rate, which lead to:
- Bad personal credit, which leads to:
- Failed credit checks for cell phone plans, forcing the carriers to:
- create new plans around Pre-pay and metered usage
- Carriers also have just reduced the price for unlimited plans below a pain threshold convincing people to drop their land lines to save more money.
I am wondering how the following two events will change these outcomes from the mega-trend.
- Another major power outage
- The launch of satellites designed to provide cellular communications
I think that a major power outage may remind people that still wan to have the land line, which would send them back to these companies to start the service back up. However, this time they will be asking for a "just in case" package.
The launch of the satellites, if they can get them to work , could change the arguments around who has the better coverage.
Let me know what you are thinking and sign up to a follower on the left side of this blog.
2 comments:
Hasn’t a similar trend been happening in developing nations for years? Cell phones have jumped past landline usage because they are cheaper. And many developing nations experience power outages on a daily basis. I think satellite may still be too expensive (e.g., the Iridium based system). Do you know of plans for satellite (or high-altitude blimp) based phones that are substantially lower in price?
Here is one: higher fuel prices in the long term will push companies like Garmin and OnStar to offer consumers the ability to plan routes that use the least fuel (more right turns, etc.). I think either UPS or FedEX is already doing this with their respective fleets.
Here is another: The poor economy and the long-term threat of terrorism have made many people jittery about a lot of things, including the personal safety of themselves and their families. This will push companies like Garmin and OnStar to offer unique routing patterns that would let a user avoid such things as high-crime areas or locations where large public events are occurring (protests, sports/concert traffic, etc.). Real-time weather would also be included (Garmin could use cell phone tech to have their devices overlay local RADAR).
Jeez, I am still the only one here. I can’t believe it. Most interesting site. Wylie, I think focusing on more than just social media and wireless would be fine for you.
Great point about developing nations relying on cell phones even with the power outages. However, I would think they were used to the power outages before the cell phones came along. This would make phone outages more tolerable. Needless to say I agree that the power outage is weak argument for keeping a landline around.
I like your idea on low fuel consumption routing due to the rising cost of fuel prices. Is this really a branch of a mega trend? In other words what lead to higher fuel prices and what lead to that and so on? I think it is really interesting realize these mega trends and follow them.
Your second routing idea is a little harder only because it becomes very subjective as to how dangerous an area is. However, it might be more doable if this were something people could opt in for and then define what dangerous meant to them. Of course if they needed to get to a place that was located within "dangerous" area then there is a slight delema.
Thanks for the advice on broadening the scope of the blog, and thanks for your comments.
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