The European wireless community has been reasonably successful at being able to feel superior to its U.S. counterparts. Europe has a unified digital standard. It offers short message services. It introduced introduced PCN.
But today I feel equal. A study by Strategy Analytics called Creating Winning Cellular Services: Consumer Research Results, says 52 percent of European cellular customers never use voice mail, 51 percent have never received a text message on their message phone display and 81 percent have never received an e-mail message on their phone.
Ha! Europeans don’t have any more of a handle on value-added services than do their U.S. counterparts, even though short message service has been available there since 1994. (Europe is somewhat of a misnomer here. The survey covered four countries: France, Germany, Sweden and the United Kingdom). Nevertheless, Ha! I was under the impression everyone was running around checking train schedules on their GSM handsets. The only reason that non-voice services hadn’t taken off in the United States was that Americans were too stupid to demand immediate access to all those nifty services.
Declan Lonergan, director of mobile communications service-Europe at Strategy Analytics, said one of the reasons value-added services have been slow to take off is because wireless operators haven’t promoted them. Sound familiar?
“Until such time as the cellular networks really begin to promote the non-voice element of their services, and start to improve user awareness of these applications, voice services will continue to be the primary revenue generator,” Lonergan said.
So now that I don’t feel inferior to wireless users in Europe, there are a couple of points in this survey that should interest U.S. wireless carriers:
Even in these European countries where cellular penetration rates approach 40 percent, the cellular industry is still relatively immature, Lonergan said. His company’s research says about 56 percent of cellular users have been using a service for less than two years. If the European market is not mature, there should be much room for wireless growth in the United States.
The other side of this survey coin is that half of the people asked have used their voice mail, half have received text messages and about one-fifth have received e-mail via their wireless handsets.
Someday, non-voice services could be an important addition to voice offerings-but not until carriers decide they should be.
