AFR story about impacts of Covid on telecom sector from marketing perspective.
Vocus has little capital invested in mobile, and is very overweight in fibre back-haul. From an asset allocation perspective i feel we are the best of the telco's for this situation. Telstra gets half its revenue from mobile, and TPG/Voda merge is all about mobile, stagnating interest in mobile likely means stagnating revenue and also likely pushes back deployment and adoption of 5G which they will commit billions to.
Consumers losing interest in mobile, favoring fixed line. "WhistleOut, a website that helps potential customers find new mobile phone and broadband plans, said it witnessed another trend at the same time as surging interest in new NBN plans: plummeting interest in new mobile phone plans. In March, interest in new broadband plans outstripped interest in new mobile plans for the first time since it began monitoring interest in mobile phone and broadband plans a decade ago."
"With users stuck at home, there would be less need for second SIMs for mobile devices such as tablets, laptops and wearables, and the number of active mobile phone accounts in 2020 "will be flat or potentially decline for the first time in the past decade", Telsyte said in its Australian Mobile Services Market Study 2020."
Looking at fixed wireless "We also saw a pretty dramatic increase in interest in wireless broadband products too, which started in mid-March," Mr Hanlon said. "It's hard to say whether this was because people were struggling with their fixed-line connections or because they were pre-empting trouble with the NBN."
