2020 will be a year like no other, not least for two sectors in which I have been working:
Aviation has suffered as demand has evaporated and capacity withdrawn;
Telecoms has met the challenge of remote home working and the demand for home entertainment.
The aviation sector hopes (even expects) to rebound once travel restrictions are normalised, and the telecoms sector expects a permanent shift in demand for network capacity. Both of these things can’t be entirely true – particularly in respect of the substitution of actual to virtual business meetings. Business meeting travel may only form a small percentage of passengers but was a disproportionately high proportion of airline revenue.
A key to understanding the return of business meeting travel is to understand Metcalf’s Law in communications.
Metcalf’s Law in communication
The value of a network is proportional to the square of the number of users. Put simply, a call needs someone with a phone at each end, or the value of LinkedIn to each user grows as more contacts join.
The corollary is that a communications network needs to reach a critical number of users before it becomes viable. This is precisely what has happened with video conferencing in 2020. Although the technology has been around for years, its only this year that it has become universally accepted and its value realised. It is not clear what proportion of this customer base will return to the skies.