Editor’s Note: RCR Wireless News asked wireless industry analysts and executives to provide their predictions for what they expect to see in 2012 across their areas of expertise.
As mobile data matures in developed markets, we expect several significant evolutions in 2012. The biggest for subscribers will be pricing plan innovations, providing new personalized service and cost options. In addition, we forecast rapid cloud service adoption, new content business models and new device segmentation.
One new type of pricing plan will be the “upside-down” model. Instead of upselling from a base monthly plan (e.g., $2 for a one-time turbo boost or $10 per month for unlimited social networking), some operators will establish a higher priced baseline of data tiers and a second set of discounted tiers for subscribers desiring a lower bill in exchange for best-effort speed when the network is congested.
Subscribers could personalize plans by the amount of data and the quality of service they desire, electing for a consistent speed at a higher price or discounts during congested periods. Operators also would establish a profitable baseline. Subscribers, who want consistently high speeds and quality of service for real-time media, including video, will pay appropriately for their bandwidth speeds and traffic in the network.
On the content side, we predict that Apple’s iCloud service will surpass 150 million users by its one-year mark. In comparison, cell phones took 14 years to have 150 million users, and Facebook took five years. The combination of a passionate customer base, familiar interface and easy access to content will drive rapid growth. ICloud adoption will mirror the broader trend of more applications and services moving to the cloud.
Increasing usage of cloud services creates new opportunities for operators. They will gain new opportunities to leverage subscriber profile information to authenticate users into cloud services and provide new means to generate specific policies for individual cloud services.
On the network side, mobile data traffic, whether for cloud applications or browsing, social media or video, will drive a significant rise in signaling traffic. In mobile broadband, that equals Diameter traffic. As Joe McGarvey, principal analyst at Current Analysis wrote, “With the possible exception of cloud and customer experience management, the hottest topic in telecom these days is how mobile operators will handle the expected explosion in signaling traffic, which is expected to increase dramatically as they move to all-IP technologies and architectures, namely LTE and IMS.”
Finally, for devices, we’ll see the Kindle Fire kick-start a new trend of devices tailored for specific vertical markets. The Android platform enables a more vertical tablet industry, and service providers and other over-the-top businesses will release their own branded devices with specialized form factors. Examples include the Cisco Cius tablet for business and tablets targeted for young children.
These are just a fraction of the changes we see for this year. Others we anticipate include shared data plans taking hold, many operators embracing “smart pipe” offerings by partnering with over-the-top players, and the LTE iPhone 5 being another Apple disruptor.
