With the 5G network being put into place and the software application market really taking off, there is a general feeling in the telco industry that service providers are not acting fast enough to be able to take advantage of the new broadband capability in the short term. This is cause for some concern, as the average customer is already hitting their data cap on a regular basis. It is clear that more bandwidth is needed, and soon, according to said Reuven Cohen, vice president of growth at cloud security provider Aporeto.

“Periscope is a prime example,” Cohen said, citing the popular live video-streaming network. “Now they’re doing a whole variety of different video-related things, Facebook Live, Yahoo live; everyone wants to do live. And all that requires massive amounts of data.”

Cohen spoke with John Furrier (@furrier), host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile live streaming studio, live from SiliconANGLE’s Palo Alto studio to get the latest news on mobile at this year’s Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Spain. The two discussed the struggles of service providers to take advantage of new infrastructure technology, as well as where the entire mobile industry is going.

With so much technology almost ready for prime time, why are telcos lagging behind the industry? According to Cohen, a large part of the problem is the fact that they still have a monopoly on mobile content distribution, because they have little competition from competing networks. However, he thinks that is about to change in many places.

“A lot of the challenge that these telcos are having is the fact that they still have a bit of a monopoly in many parts of the world and they use that monopoly to inflict quite a bit of pain,” Cohen explained. “But I don’t think that’s something that they’re going to be able to get away with very much longer.”

The year of Snapchat

Businesses in all regards are looking ahead to where the mobile industry is going, in particular who has the most successful business model out there right now, Cohen said.

He also mentioned that many eyes are on the mobile application Snapchat. The company will soon be offering a public IPO and is claiming its revenue will be increasing five-fold in the short term. To many in the mobile world, this business model is seen as the future of mobile applications, Cohen stated.

“2017 is shaping up to be the year of Snapchat, if you ask me,” said Cohen. “It looks like everything we’ve been talking about, the app-based world, is sort of culminating in this Snapchat thing.”

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE and theCUBE’s coverage of the Mobile World Congress 2017 Barcelona.

Photo: SiliconANGLE