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Thanks to satellite coverage, the Internet will be available even for hard-to-reach regions. What can this lead to?
About the expert: Roman Kumar Vias, founder of Qmarketing agency and Qmarketing Academy, co-owner of Qlean.
In October 2020, Elon Musk’s SpaceX launched a public beta test of the Starlink global satellite system. Now residents of the United States and Canada have access to the Internet Mask. To use Starlink services, you need to make a one-time payment of $499, and then pay $99 monthly. In early November, Elon Musk announced that the service would be available in Europe as early as February 2021.
Amazon owner Jeff Bezos is keeping up with his rival. As part of its Kuiper project, it is planned to launch 3 satellites into low Earth orbit. At the same time, broadband services will begin after 236 satellites are put into orbit. When this will happen is still unclear.
The desire of visionaries like Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk to make the Internet ubiquitous is understandable: it is cruel to deprive 38% of the world’s population of “new air”. But what are the consequences of an explosive population growth on the Web?
1. Growth in demand for advertising
Hundreds of millions of new users, not spoiled by digital content, will break into the Internet, for whom online shopping will be new. Brands will unleash a war for a new audience, which means that the demand for digital advertising production and online business transfer services will increase. This has already happened in India, when the innovative telecom operator Jio attracted 250 million users in two years, who were provided with the highest speed Internet in the country, and could use it for free for six months.
2. Demand for training in digital professions
According to a report from McKinsey, India alone will have between 2025 million and 60 million new internet jobs by 65 thanks to digitalization, and all these people will need to be trained to work in a new environment. The EdTech market is already predicted to grow to $285,2 billion by 2027 from the current $89,1 billion. Researchers are trying to take into account the growth in Internet availability in their forecasts, but there is reason to believe that with the real penetration of technology, these numbers will grow significantly.
3. Lower prices for digital services
The more new professionals emerge from developing countries, the more the average market value of digital professionals can fall. Now you can work as an Internet marketer, web designer or developer from anywhere in the world – the value of offices and location binding has been greatly overestimated.
Many companies still prefer to hire a copywriter on the stock exchange, and find a designer and programmer in India. The more such specialists and small studios appear on the market, the more difficult it will be for the average customer to understand why he should overpay ten times for the same set of services.
4. Demand for culturologists
It is impossible to show the same creative in India, America and our country and expect equally good results. At first, new users will be “dark horses” for marketers, with whom it is not clear how to interact.
Companies will compete for the right to be the first in a new market and look for “guides” in undeveloped areas, for example, cultural researchers with knowledge of local dialects and cultural customs. Whoever understands first how to reach new users will bite off the biggest piece of the pie.
5. Fraudsters will learn local dialects
One of the memes of the early 2000s is “a letter from a Nigerian prince,” which says that your namesake died somewhere very far away, and you are the only heir to a fabulous fortune. For sophisticated users, the old proven schemes will no longer work, but digital beginners will not be immune to such techniques.
Companies will have to think hard about improving their anti-fraud mechanisms, and payment systems – about the policy of chargebacks so that the wallets of new users are not purged on the first day of connection.
6. Fintech revolution
Users will come to the Internet, but they may not have bank cards. So, in 2020, only 1,7% of the female and 3,4% of the male population in Nigeria had a credit card. There are currently 2,33 billion active Visa debit cards in the world, while the world’s population is 7,5 billion.
In the coming years, we will see a race of ingenuity in the field of Internet acquiring, and solutions on a par with the case of paying for Google Play purchases at the checkout of offline stores.
If you are going to sell something to an audience of new Internet users, it is important to follow the payment methods that are relevant in the region, because the standard acquiring of Visa and Mastercard may turn out to be a bad solution.
7. eSIM, virtual cards and full digital
Thanks to satellites, the Internet will be available even in remote corners of the planet. Therefore, many services can be obtained without a visit to the city center. Virtual SIM cards, virtual cards and Internet banking in general, legaltech — remote signing of documents and everything that makes life more convenient and richer — will be in the top of demand.
8. Superapps and marketplaces
Traditional ISPs will find themselves in a “diversify or die” situation, as with the advent of such a strong competitor, it makes no sense to use their product.
Even now, they hardly converge unit-economy per user. The inertia towards changing operators is decreasing, so operators will have to migrate to other verticals. Telecom has a huge user base that can be monetized, which means that if their services become uncompetitive, the logical step is to move towards creating an ecosystem with subscription models, from which it will be harder for the user to leave.
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