Latest thoughts on a European-wide carrier network consolidation, announced last week by France Telecom, Telefonica, Deutsche Telekom and Telecom Italia, might bring up further opportunities for other industries on mainland Europe. What is intended to become an alternative to the vetoed domestic carrier consolidation in order to position themselves towards global competitors from the Americas and Asia, further carries the chance to become the ground for new business models in the automotive industry.

Vehicle manufacturers, together with engineering companies and IT suppliers, are currently discussing joint business models for providing cloud-based and context-related services for both vehicle and driver respectively passengers. These services will depend on a strong technological infrastructure as well as on comprehensive business strategies across multiple parties involved. An autonomous communication between a vehicle and its environment (e.g. other vehicles, traffic control systems, airports, hotels, etc.) on a business trip from Frankfurt to Paris for instance, will only provide a value-add to a customer, if he neither has to switch off his car-internet-connection when crossing the border nor has to worry about dramatic cost increases when keeping his communication-services up and running while hitting the road towards the French capital.

The idea of an European-wide carrier network (without expensive roaming costs for the contract holder) represents a necessity for such business cases as described above. Otherwise these mobile services won’t provide any benefits to its users. This announcement of these four European telecom giants should be considered as a serious signal for car manufacturers, IT vendors and engineering providers in order to bring these parties to the same table and discuss those comprehensive business opportunities together.

If you want to learn more about trends and growth drivers for the R&D services and STIE market in Germany, please have a look at the latest PAC Market InSight report “Software development for the future – what makes up the domestic R&D services and STIE market in Germany 2012″.

Post by Philipp Schalla