“Mobile data pricing – flat and getting flatter”: A Report on the May 27 Mobile Minute Webinar
On May 27, we kicked off the 2009 series of Mobile Minute webinars with “Mobile Data Caps: Can Carriers Profitably Control Data Usage?” This event – led by FierceWireless as part of its FierceLive! webinar program – drew 365 registrations and 173 unique live visitors from Europe, the Middle East, Africa, Asia, Latin America, the U.S., and Canada.
Webinar panelists included (from left to right below) John Jackson, vice president of Research at CCS Insight and former vice president of the mobile and wireless practice at Yankee Group; Larry Socher, global lead for the Network Offering Group at Accenture; and Adrian Hall, chief marketing officer at Bytemobile.
FierceWireless Executive Editor Lynnette Luna moderated the panel.
John Jackson led off with the assertion that data pricing is a dire concern – ‘flat and getting flatter’. He argued that while dramatic growth in mobile data traffic will continue, network operators cannot profitably grow their data business with the current generation of network technologies. Although many consider Long-Term Evolution (LTE) the ‘default panacea’, it will not meet all of the complex and interdependent functional requirements for keeping up with data demand. According to Jackson, carriers have a ‘long-term identity crisis’ – value-added content provider versus bit pipe – that will require much more than network cost reduction to resolve.
Larry Socher of Accenture addressed future drivers of mobile revenue growth for operators – new data and entertainment applications, convergence and the ‘always connected’ lifestyle of consumers, and interconnectivity of mobile and fixed devices. He stressed the importance of integrated value-added services in customer retention and highlighted the emergence of vertical applications – e.g., on-board automotive – enabled by lower-cost mobile devices with ubiquitous connectivity.
Adrian Hall presented the Bytemobile perspective on the discussion, emphasizing the forces of convergence, personalization, openness, and cost control in moving mobile data forward. He cited a seminal finding of an October 2008 survey of industry senior executives conducted by The Economist Intelligence Unit – that charging variable prices for bandwidth consumption at different times of day will be an important future source of revenue for operators – and industry research on the impact of uncontrolled data usage on operators’ profitability. Hall closed with a quick summary of the business benefits of the Bytemobile product portfolio, referencing specific points made earlier by Jackson and Socher.
Lynnette Luna referred to the webinar in an article in the May 28 edition of FierceBroadbandWireless and the June 1 edition of FierceWireless.
Following the panel presentations, Luna took selected questions from the online participants. In addition, the audience was polled on a multiple-choice question, which appears below with a chart of the answers selected by percentage of the total respondents.
The majority selection of differentiated service packaging and pricing provides further validation of the value proposition of Bytemobile applications such as OSN WebGate™ Service and Media Fidelity™ Suite Media Optimization in enabling operators to control and monetize data usage as traffic continues to grow.
Please note that our next webinar – “Making a Better Mobile Browser”, also led by FierceWireless – is scheduled for June 18. You can register here.
-Jaishree Subramania
Tags: bandwidth consumption, bit pipe, convergence, data demand, data pricing, data usage, long term evolution, lte, mobile data traffic, mobile ecosystem, network operators, openness, personalization