In North America, the swift growth of mobile broadband has been instrumental in shoring up ARPU (average revenue per user) numbers, which were threatened by the commoditization of voice. With new applications and ideas coupled with improvements in key mobile-phone technologies, there is no doubt that the mobile broadband ecosystem will generate increasing revenues. However, it remains to be seen if operators benefit and the ARPU trend can be sustained or even improved upon.
The next set of interesting devices — whether they be M2M, consumer electronics, netbooks or smartphones with enhanced user-interface and displays such as rollable eInk screens from Polymer Vision, Pico-DLP from TI, interferometric modulator display (iMoD) from Qualcomm and Microsoft Surface, to name a few – will revolutionize how users interact with their environment. Unified Communication and Collaboration (UCC) applications with seamless session sweeping (transfer) across different devices and access domains will continue to proliferate and evolve (www.damaka.com).
It is not hard to imagine a future kitchen with a smart Surface refrigerator with UCC allowing a person to wirelessly receive coupons and order food along with keeping a visible synchronized calendar and to-do list, amongst other things. However, the primary beneficiaries of the new revenue streams are far from clear. If the iPhone model is any indication of the future trend, then the business models of both operators and major infrastructure vendors will have to be closely examined.
Realizing the full potential of the new ecosystem will require deployment of next-generation access technologies as well as IP-transformation of the network. In North America, the inflection point will be the introduction of a discontinuity by LTE and WiMAX deployments, although based on recent announcements LTE seems to be the primary technology of choice. For operators, this introduces technical and business challenges impacting both top and bottom lines. IP transformation is a need, but also a threat to existing sources of revenue. In an all-IP world, new revenue sources with stickiness will be needed to counter over-the-top applications and services. In this environment it is far from certain that the operator will be relegated to being a bit-pipe.
Operators have key assets such as customer-relationship management (billing, support, etc.), presence, and location, which, coupled with intelligent data mining, could create context for targeted delivery of advertisements and value-add content. This can facilitate a diversity of operator business cases such as intelligent bit-pipe, content portal/aggregation, value-added channel or simply CRM. The business models of Japanese operators SoftBank (Content Portal/Aggregation + Channel) and EMOBILE (intelligent bit-pipe + CRM), are good examples of this kind of diversity.
Finally, in this environment, infrastructure vendors need to migrate from being technology suppliers to end-to-end solution providers. Their products need to be IP-based as well as flexible and scalable with a view toward easy integration in a Service-oriented Architecture based network.
