The impact of smartphone adoption on consumers’ switching behavior in broadband and cable TV services

The emergence of smartphones has brought a technology disruption to the telecom business. Due to the various services offered in association with smartphones, people can surf the web or watch TV. This research is related to telecom services overall, and has the goal of finding the impact of smartphone adoption to consumers’ switching behavior in broadband and cable TV services. This research adopts a quasi-experimental design and investigates the causal effect of smartphone service adoption on broadband and cable TV service choices. The data collection involves five years of consumer service subscriptions in a Singaporean telecommunications company. I tested for evidence on the impacts of the different treatment effects based on service upgrade and downgrade behavior by the company's existing customers. My preliminary analysis suggests that smartphone users tend to downgrade their broadband and cable TV services less than feature phone users. This implies that there is no substitution effect between smartphones, on the one hand, and broadband and cable TV services, on the other. I am currently working on a statistical model to capture the complementary effects of smartphone adoption.