The telecommunications services industry is one of the fastest growing industries in the business world. Telecommunications services are offered by telecommunications service providers for the purpose of sending and receiving messages through electronic devices. Services include phone internet access, email, text, television, radio and fax. Telecommunications services have a robust global market presence, with the mobile services segment comprising a large chunk. Telecommunications services have proved very beneficial for businesses as they facilitate effective communication with their customers and help establish a healthy relationship with them. Telecommunications services are also beneficial for the employees as they enable easy transmission of data and provide efficiency and flexibility. The smartphone, a key application of the rapidly growing mobile telecommunication, includes an extensive range of applications and functions. The various types of mobile services are the internet, networking for home, networking for business, phone, television, etc., of which the phone and internet are the fastest growing services. Some disadvantages associated with the telecommunications services market are security issues and equipment expenses among others.

Factors enhancing the growth of telecommunications services are modern and advanced technology, market competition, investment in new telecommunication technologies like wireless communication and satellite, innovative services like e-education and e-agriculture, high-skilled technical manpower, affordability of services, demand for high speed internet, data processing, etc. However, some factors stymying the telecommunications services market growth are high cost of value-added services, maintaining security traits and non-awareness among consumers.

The telecommunications services market can be segmented into value-added services and basic communication services. Value-added services include electronic data interchange e-mail, data processing, voicemail, online database storage while basic telecommunication services include circuit-switched data transmission, facsimile services, voice telephone services, telegraph services, packet-switched data transmission, telex services and others.

Telecommunications services have a growing market in Europe, North America, Latin America and the Asia-Pacific region. Internet and mobile phone services are the fastest growing telecommunications services with a strong market presence in Europe and America.

A few key players in the telecommunications services are IBM, Cisco, Alcatel-Lucent, Deutsche Telekom, Juniper Networks, Tata, Nokia and Vodafone. Services provided by these companies are storage area networks, entry-level servers, storage products, enterprise networking services, storage networking services, services for application networking services, 3G services, bandwidths, broadband networks, calling cards, CDMA services, dial-up internet enterprise data services, mobiles and many more.  Among them, 3G services, data processing, broadband networking and the internet services are rapidly growing in the market. It has been observed that the number of internet users across the globe is increasing exponentially day by day, and thus the market for internet-based services is at its peak, with Europe being the leading marketplace for internet-based services.

Key strategies of these players are high quality and high standard services, innovative services, like ultra-broadband by Alcatel-Lucent, advanced telecom technologies, creative thinking and many others. They also use business expansion strategies like mergers & acquisitions, for instance, TATA acquired BT Group’s Mosaic business, AT&T Corp. and SBC merged and named it AT&T Inc., and the merger of MCI and Verizon.