LONG-DISTANCE FUTURE MIXED BAG

Posted: 10/2003

LONG-DISTANCE FUTURE MIXED BAG
Outlook Hinges on Segment, Competitive Position
By Joyce Lo and Taher Bouzayen

RBOC entry into the long-distance market coupled with overall declining retail voice revenue will create a challenging environment for longdistance players over the next several years, according to new research from Boston-based Atlantic-ACM. While all long-distance players will combat shrinkage in the retail voice segment, major interexchange players  especially those with residential customers  are most vulnerable to Bell bundles, which may or may not include wireless, DSL and entertainment services but always incorporate long-distance services. Nonetheless, growth opportunities exist in the private line, data and wholesale voice segments.

Sizing Trends. The overall size of the long-distance industry was $81.4 billion in 2002  a 14 percent contraction from the previous year. The net size of the industry will be the result of opposing growth and shrinkage forces within industry subsegments.

Digging into the numbers, all segments of the retail long-distance voice market will decline at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of -5.6 percent from 2002 to 2008. This decline is the result of several factors including significant migration to voice over IP (VoIP) services, bankruptcies and restructurings among major telecommunications firms, macroeconomic conditions and increased price compression caused by RBOC entry.

On the other hand, while RBOC entry will drive down rates at the retail level, it will push the wholesale switched-voice market to grow by 3.8 percent annually. Within the wholesale market, AT&Ts share will skyrocket from 20.2 percent in 2002 to nearly 33 percent in 2008, reflecting large contracts it captured from MCI and other carriers facing financial difficulties.

Image: Total Interexchange Services Share Analysis - 2001-2008

Concurrently, private line and data revenue will grow at a CAGR of 5.7 percent. Private line and data is the only area expected to be consistent in its growth curve over the next several years.

When all these factors are combined, growth in data and private line services and fixed bottoms in bundles will offset losses from the retail voice side. The net result is the industry will shrink at an overall CAGR of 0.4 percent to $79.5 billion by 2008.

Packet Migration Continues. Long-distance players continue to aggressively pursue IP opportunities. As discussed above, VoIP is at the center of this migration as it helps customers cut costs while at the same time simplifying carrier networks by running voice traffic over new or existing IP and frame relay links. The predictability of this trend has been underscored by equipment purchases. Large carriers, including Verizon Communications Inc. and Qwest Communications International Inc., have inked billion-dollar deals with equipment makers such as Nortel Networks to add packet-switching capabilities to their networks. All significant carriers are acting accordingly to add packet switching to their networks.

Convergence and Bundling. The blurring of long-distance, local, data and wireless services will continue as innovative bundling strategies are deployed to increase average revenue per user and improve customer retention. It is widely recognized that the RBOCs are wellpositioned to capture significant market share as they wrap up approval to offer long distance in the states they have not yet cracked. The Big Three are the most vulnerable to RBOC competition  particularly on the residential front  since the RBOCs already have captured significant revenue since 1999.

Between 1999 and 2002, the collective market share of residential minutes for AT&T Corp., MCI and Sprint Corp. declined by 22.4 percent. At the same time, the RBOCs leapfrogged to double-digit penetration, generating 10.6 percent of residential interLATA minutes in 2002. All told, the Big Threes market share, which was 67.5 percent in 2002, will shrink to 53.7 percent by 2008.

Significant pricing pressure also has begun as a result of bundles, primarily for residential and small business services. Aggressive price cuts in the highspeed Internet access market, and discounted packages for local and longdistance services already have led MCI to adjust its 2003  2005 growth forecast, predicting a 15 percent decline in sales to $24.5 billion in 2003, flat revenue in 2004 and a 2 percent increase to $25 billion in 2005.

Outlook. So the bad news is the once-lucrative voice market is shrinking. The good news is the data market expects healthy growth in all segments. From the low revenue, one-line residence to the multimillion, multilocation businesses, data is becoming an increasingly essential part of communications. In addition to broadband, customers are learning to use an expanding array of services.

These trends should serve as a wake-up call to competitive telecommunications players that have not yet developed plans, partnerships or investments in their own product and service choices. While targeting growth areas can provide some respite from declining revenue streams in core products, single-service solutions  especially in the longdistance arena  are insufficient for sustaining growth and providing hedges against lost revenue. Providers should be aggressively pursuing multiservice solutions to inculcate their customer bases against competitive bundles and as a means of offsetting lost customers and declining revenue.