Posted: 2/8/2012 11:00:00 AM | Author: Scott Larson | Send Feedback
Category: Trends in Devices, Applications, and Content
In addition to being an American cultural institution, the Super Bowl clearly ranks at the top of the list when it comes to annual media events capable of driving unique online traffic patterns and bursts of popular content. This is highlighted by the large number of YouTube views of popular Super Bowl advertisements generated in a short period of time. While this year's video ad fare may not rack up the same numbers as the classic Darth Vader Volkswagen commercial from last year's Super Bowl (ranked #5 among the top ten ads of the last five years by Neilson, with over 50 million views to date), the trends are compelling, particularly as they relate to mobile traffic. Clint Eastwood's already iconic "Half-time in America" video for Chrysler has already been viewed more than 4 million times in 4 days. In a blog post this week, Google reported that approximately 41% of searches related to Super Bowl ads made during the game came from mobile devices, a figure that reflects the increasing use of smartphones and, more recently, tablets for digital media consumption. According to a recent survey from comScore, for example, the mobile media user population in the U.S. grew 19% in the past year to more than 116 million people at the end of August 2011; with U.S. tablet traffic growing from 22.5% to 28.1% of non-computer traffic in just four months (May to August, 2011).
As we've highlighted in previous posts, the rise of mobile video traffic and concentration of the videos among fewer content sources and distribution points, represents an opportunity for optimization technologies that exploit repeat traffic patterns in the RAN where congestion poses the greatest risk to positive subscriber experience. While video content concentration trends may vary market-to-market, the impact on capacity planning in an operator's network is the same.
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Posted: 1/23/2012 10:00:00 AM | Author: Talbot Hack | Send Feedback
Category: MBB Usage Patterns and Traffic Mix
Arieso, a location-based services infrastructure vendor, recently published a smartphone market study with several interesting insights into evolving user behavior as smartphone penetration ramps up in developed markets. Arieso thoroughly cataloged how and why average smartphone users are steadily increasing their data usage. The smartphone statistics in their press release were widely covered by Bloomberg and other media outlets, but one of the most revealing insights from their study was largely ignored: the amount of 3G dongle/modem traffic being generated compared to their iPhone 3GS benchmark. The reported usage numbers – reflecting increases since 2010 – tell the story:
Uplink data volumes:
- 3G Modems (various): 2654%
- HTC Desire S: 323%
- iPhone 4S: 320%
Downlink data volumes:
- 3G Modems (various): 2432%
- iPhone 4S: 276%
- Samsung Galaxy S: 199%
As the industry well knows, dongle-equipped laptops are consuming the elephant's share of mobile broadband traffic volume – Siri or not! Arieso's own data indicates this consumption approaches 10x the downlink volume of the iPhone 4S; the greediest 1% of users (over 65% of which are dongle users) now consume over half of downlink data volume. Yet the 276% increase among iPhone 4S users was regarded as the 'big news item' by most media outlets that ran the story. 3G dongles may not inspire headlines as readily as the latest smartphones, but for network operators this class of device represents a disproportionately clear and present problem.
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Posted: 1/12/2012 10:00:00 AM | Author: Scott Hilton | Send Feedback
Category: Services, Economics, and Technologies
While improving "Customer Experience" is clearly top of mind for mobile operators and optimization solution vendors, the methods for measuring how users interact with mobile services and how customers assess and "feel" about that relationship are complex and multi-layered. As optimization solutions become more integral to the delivery of mobile broadband services, defining the impact optimization has on the perceived experience of users becomes all the more important.
Value propositions for vendor solutions that optimize mobile services typically fall into three categories:
- Operational efficiency and savings – by optimizing application, data, voice or video content these solutions reduce the need for investments in mobile core or radio access networks, thus reducing CapEx and OpEx
- New Service Creation – by providing more control and granular visibility, optimization solutions can enable new services that operators can sell or differentiate their offerings
- Improved Customer Experience – by making networks more efficient and avoiding congestion and poor application performance, optimization solutions can improve how customers perceive network performance, thereby reducing churn and increasing customer satisfaction with their operator
The following diagram illustrates one potential model for understanding the relationships among customers, users, applications, service providers and mobile networks as they pertain to measuring and assessing quality.
It is evident that technical measures of network Quality of Service (QoS) represent only one of several inputs to the overall "customer experience" equation. Optimization solutions enhance and improve the traditional QoS performance of existing network deployments. These solutions affect the performance of mobile applications by, among other things, improving throughput, lowering latency and jitter, reducing dropped packets, reducing connection times, increasing coverage, and improving data call success rates.
The user experiences these benefits through the lens of applications they are using on their smartphone, tablet or other mobile device. The measures of Quality of User Experience (QoUE) vary widely by application and device type and tend to be subjective. The most formalized examples of QoUE measures are based on Mean Opinion Score (MOS) tests from the voice and video world. MOS attempts to quantify the user's perception of the quality of a voice call or a video. QoUE can also be broadened to other human factor metrics about the applications themselves (e.g., HTML page abandonment, bad links, shopping cart abandonment, slow search results, etc.) which are beyond the control or influence of the mobile network itself.
One important distinction is that just improving the quality of the user viewing experience and application performance does not guarantee the overall customer experience will improve in all cases. In the above model, the customer is separate from the user. In the case of a consumer these might be the same entity (i.e., you!), but it could also be an enterprise purchasing services from a mobile operator on behalf of its employees. The metrics for Quality of Customer Experience (QoCE) are much different than QoS or QoUE. QoCE focuses on the business level interactions with the service provider (e.g., service mix, pricing, billing, and support) and is measured through metrics such as churn rate, ARPU, and call rates into service centers.
So given the complex and indirect relationship between optimization solutions and a holistic customer experience assessment, what are some of the best ways to measure and assess the value of optimization solutions from a QoUE perspective? First, these solutions should continue to measure traditional QoS metrics (throughput, latency, etc.), but also expand to include metrics that focus on measuring congestion and the avoidance of congestion at critical points in the network. Congestion is the most direct cause of poor network and application behavior – and by association QoUE. Optimization solutions should not only improve network performance but also provide a multi-layered measurement of congestion onset, congestion duration, and congestion impact and then report important metrics such as:
- Minutes per day above a congestion threshold
- Congested minutes avoided by using optimization solutions
- % congestion avoidance
What really matters from a customer experience perspective is to more closely tie optimization effects to QoUE improvement. Sycamore's IQstream solution provides a strong set of optimization capabilities tied with specific KPIs focused on measuring and reporting congestion avoidance in the performance- and cost-sensitive access portion of the mobile network. Armed with these KPIs, mobile operators can directly link the value of content optimization with improvements in their subscribers' QoUE.
For more information about this topic, please see Kalevi Kilkki's "Quality of Experience in Communications Ecosystem" article.
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Posted: 12/12/2011 11:00:00 AM | Author: Scott Larson | Send Feedback
Category: Trends in Devices, Applications, and Content
In the U.S., Black Friday (the day following Thanksgiving) marks the opening of the year-end holiday shopping season. Since 2005 it has also represented the busiest shopping day of the year, a concentrated point in time during which consumers flood retail stores and contend for highly sought after items and splurge on special sales, resulting in scenes of chaos and frenzy I imagine to be similar to the contention for network bandwidth during congestion periods. As the picture below indicates, this year was no different at the retail store level.
But what was different this year was evidence of the growing impact the tablet revolution is having in our lives - and specifically our shopping lives. We've discussed tablet trends in previous posts, but recent data from Compuware APM adds yet a new dimension to the picture, underlining the significant influence these new media devices are having on the retail environment despite relatively low penetration rates (11% in the U.S. according to Pew Research).
The fact that we are still in the very early stages of the tablet revolution was confirmed by comScore data released last month: traffic from tablets still represents a small percentage of overall traffic in the U.S., yet its rate of growth (from little more than 20% to nearly 30% in the last four months alone) is convincing evidence of a steep trajectory.
These trends are clearly not lost on advertisers, who are already beginning to see (according to a September 2011 Rhythm NewMedia report) increased effectiveness across multiple segments from in-stream mobile video advertising vs. traditional online video ads, with an 87% completion rate on average for mobile in-stream ads compared to 59-81% completion rates for online ads. As tablets drive increased consumption of premium video content (and especially long- versus short-form video), advertisers are also reaping the benefits of shifts in consumer behavior that include a greater willingness to sit through video ads in exchange for free content.
Retail shopping is only one of many segments in our society and culture undergoing dramatic change as a result of the adoption of increasingly sophisticated mobile devices and tablets in both consumer markets and the enterprise space. This is encouraging news for mobile operators looking for any and all ways to drive more data traffic over their networks. But along with this opportunity comes the obligation to continually deliver an optimal user experience - even in the depths of a U.S. mall on Black Friday.
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Posted: 11/18/2011 1:30:00 PM | Author: Scott Larson | Send Feedback
Category: Trends in Devices, Applications, and Content
I have a friend who is an ardent fan of the American rock star Bruce Springsteen. Recently, he shared an interesting story that highlights the convergence of mobile and media - i.e., capable mobile devices, social media, and the heightened interest in both user-generated and corporate-sponsored live video streaming. At a small venue in Pittsburgh, PA earlier this month, Springsteen performed an intimate concert for the lucky few able to get tickets to the exclusive event. My friend, unfortunately, was not among those lucky fans. However, thanks to a resourceful fan at the concert equipped with a video-enabled smartphone, instant communication via Twitter and a live streaming website, my friend was able to enjoy the concert experience as if he were actually there in person.
My friend was visiting family at the time of the concert, but his extensive Springsteen Twitter network quickly alerted him to a bitly link to a live concert feed from the venue. Within seconds, he was connected remotely to the Ustream-hosted video feed (www.ustream.com). Excited about the concert and wishing other family members could enjoy it as well, he then deftly shifted from watching on his iPhone to watching on his relative's 3G-equipped laptop connected to an HDTV screen and stereo system. For the next few hours, everyone was able to rock to a mobile broadband-enabled concert experience.
While short-form, on-demand video streaming continues to be the dominant form of Internet video consumption, the live-stream video market is in the early stages of an upward trajectory. This content form, not surprisingly, reflects a myriad of market forces driving a seemingly infinite range of consumer interests and commercial prerequisites. For example, while online auto enthusiasts partook of the live HD-streamed Internet launch of Chevrolet's all-new Malibu earlier this year (an industry "first" according to the GM press release), a much larger group of Internet video consumers (by an order of magnitude) intently watched live, around-the-clock video coverage of a family of bald eagles in Decorah, Iowa (the most-watched live Ustream channel at approximately 100 million views during May, 2011). Regardless of whether you consider the big, mainstream events (e.g., 72 million total YouTube live streams for this year's Royal Wedding) or the small events like my friend's concert experience, they all add up to more demand for network capacity. Given that a significant proportion of this type of video is now originating from (and often streaming to) mobile devices, this trend portends additional sources of congestion in mobile networks - and especially at the network access edge.
Among the market forces driving this live-streaming phenomena are several user-generated aggregation sites including Ustream, Livestream, Justin.tv and YouTube. All the top live entertainment, news and sports sites offer live-streamed content too: Sky TV's Sky Go broadcasts of English football matches; BBC's iPlayer-based live streaming of newscasts; and ESPN3's live-streaming of basketball, soccer and baseball games. According to their recent corporate blog post, Justin.tv pushes at peak usage about 250 Gbps of video (the equivalent of 23,936 standard DVDs per hour) to over 30 million viewers. They also claim their iPhone and Android applications have been downloaded a collective 4.5 million times. The convergence of these broadcast platforms with live-streaming and social media (e.g., Ustream's Facebook application that enables live streaming from your Facebook page) will contribute to the further evolution of data traffic patterns and put yet further demands on mobile network capacity.
As the live-stream market picks up, mobile operators need to prepare for this dynamic shift in traffic patterns and subscriber viewing habits (remember: my friend's Springsteen video stream was delivered from that nearby 3G base-station for approximately two hours!). Mobile broadband optimization in the Core and Access networks will be critical to an operator's ability not only to deliver but also to capitalize on consumers' growing desire for live-stream content. If operators hope to more effectively monetize their networks - particularly as it relates to their highest-value subscribers - then traffic optimization and better conservation of network resources will be critical to delivering the differentiated services, consistent service quality and capacity needed to attract new subscribers and mitigate churn along the "Thunder Road" of mobile broadband.
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Posted: 10/14/2011 3:00:00 PM | Author: Talbot Hack | Send Feedback
Category: Trends in Devices, Applications, and Content
The rapid rise of the tablet as consumers' preferred multi-media consumption device, as a technology object of desire and fashion statement, and as the latest enterprise creativity (and productivity) tool are all widely chronicled phenomena. But digging below the headlines, what is the real appeal to consumers and enterprise users of this new class of 'connected' device? What are some of the key innovations in applications, services and hardware that could make this love affair enduring? And what opportunities and challenges do these developments present to mobile operators?
The tablet's 'connect on the go' attributes - easy portability and near-instantaneous boot up thanks to lightweight, smartphone-derived operating systems (OS) - coupled with a rich visual experience and natural gesture-based inputs have quickly made tablets the default gadget for casual browsing at home and the local coffee shop, and a versatile platform for the office. It has also become an essential travel accessory for many business and pleasure users, replacing the ubiquitous laptop at a fraction of the weight and space. No doubt the degree of personalization possible - i.e., the ability to load your tablet with any number of clever and engaging apps to suit your personal/professional interests and needs - is a big part of this appeal. Multi-screen TV/video experiences such as HBO-GO, ESPN3, Sky-Go, Netflix and many others are ideal for the tablet form-factor too.
Both Forrester Research and ComScore recently observed that tablet users spend more time browsing the web and are more inclined to spend money online compared to smartphone and laptop/PC users. The Economist reckons this is because tablet owners tend to be more affluent, and the immersive tablet experience creates greater buying impulses. ComScore's research affirms this point (at least in the US): as of August 2011, nearly half of tablet owners belonged to households earning $100K or more. This demographic represents a lucrative opportunity for mobile operators, advertisers, content providers and others serving the demand for personal connectivity.
Enterprises are aggressively adopting tablets for several reasons including the wide range of business applications for gesture-based technology, signature capture, image generation and markup, etc. Another compelling attribute is the ability to use off-the-shelf hardware with a consumer (read: rapidly falling) cost curve. But probably the most important attribute is the desire of enterprise users to have the same light, portable and versatile platform at work as they do at home. Apple's CEO Tim Cook claims over 90% of the Fortune 500 are testing or deploying iPads now, as are a number of major hospitals around the US. On the content side, HTML5-based platforms like Pressly, Zite and Flipboard are helping redefine online publishing by enabling content owners to quickly convert their publications into tablet-friendly multimedia websites supporting the analytics, full screen ad insertion, e-commerce, mapping and other essential functions associated with traditional websites. During their iPad app launch this week, Facebook took time to extoll the cross-device value of HTML5 to their mobile platform strategy. These developments underscore the influence tablets are having across numerous industries and the growing importance of these devices to enterprise business models.
Another self-reinforcing tablet trend is the staggering breadth of available apps and the rate of proliferation of new ones for the two most popular smartphone/tablet OSs - Apple's iOS and Google's Android. Convenient online app stores, low prices, 'freemium' apps with in-app purchase options and seamless downloads have turned these purchases into a frictionless process and therefore a more spontaneous (and frequent) activity for consumers. Behind this vibrant market is a healthy ecosystem of hardware, OS, application and service delivery developers, many coming from the mobility industry, who have turned the traditional personal computing platform and OS development models upside down and ushered in an era of much more agile development, faster product launches and faster updates. The spider chart from market intelligence firm Asymco cleverly illustrates how this new approach is compressing time-to-market at the same time it is helping expand the total market opportunity.
So what opportunities and challenges do these developments present to mobile operators in particular? Although the majority of tablets sold to date have been Wi-Fi only (notwithstanding Apple's original 3G-enabled iPad launch in 2010), if mobile broadband has taught our industry one thing it is that mobility is a big value-add for consumers. The freedom of high-speed Internet access virtually anywhere without the need for a Wi-Fi hotspot is compelling to many users. But mobile operators will have to continually improve their 3G/4G service coverage, capacity, quality - and capabilities - in order to attract new users and significantly expand the population of connected devices on their networks.
Mobile cloud computing is one capability operators are pursing to broaden their offerings and deliver integrated 'smart pipe' services for all types of connected devices. Tablets and smartphones - really apps in general - are becoming heavily dependent on cloud-based services. Music, video streaming, IP videoconferencing, social media, social gaming and personal storage are all benefitting from (and driving) this shift to the cloud. And this dependency will only increase in the future. Letting people (and businesses) store their content in the cloud and retrieve it from anywhere and any device is a liberating and empowering proposition. A number of mobile operators including SingTel with their "intelligent utility" private cloud platform, Telstra with their Connected Clouds concept for enterprise customers that spans fixed and mobile, and T-Mobile parent Deutsche Telecom, are already aggressively expanding their mobile cloud capabilities specifically to capitalize on this accelerating demand in the enterprise.
From an operator perspective, two medium-term hurdles to widespread adoption of connected tablets are capturing a larger piece of the sales channel and bringing down device costs. Recent analysis by ABI Research revealed that operators only represented 13% of all tablets shipped during the first half of the year as customers presumably opted for a visit to their local brick-and-mortar outlet to touch and feel these new devices before making a purchase commitment. As ABI points out, operators need to quickly translate their success marketing smartphones and all manner of wireless accessories into more effective in-store and online tablet campaigns if they expect to capture a larger piece of this pie.
In the same research report, ABI Research estimated only 36% of tablets sold in North America included built-in cellular connections through the first quarter of 2011. Early adopter consumers and enterprise users no doubt comprised the bulk of these sales. The good news is Android-based, 3G-equipped models are appearing on the market every month at retail prices well under $500. And Apple's strategy of value-pricing earlier product generations as they launch successors presages a 3G iPad under $500 before long. Most importantly, in contrast to the PC and mobile industry's failed attempt a few years ago to embed 3G radios in low-end netbooks and laptops, the tablet provides everything that was missing back then: a superior interactive experience due to greater computing power and graphics - and compelling apps! These dynamics will likely spur significant numbers of people and firms to make the mobile tablet plunge over the next few years. Juniper Research estimates the balance will shift substantially by 2016 when models with 3G connectivity are expected to comprise over half of all tablet sales worldwide.
But perhaps the biggest remaining hurdle to wider consumer adoption is resistance to having separate 3G/4G subscriptions for their smartphones, home PCs - and now tablets. A recent operator survey conducted by Strategy Analytics suggests that consumers with multiple devices are hungry for a single data plan to connect all of their devices. They cite Rogers Wireless, Bell Mobility, Telefonica Spain and Proximus Belgium as examples of service providers already offering multi-device plans. In the US, AT&T has widely hinted at offering multi-device 'family' plans that would draw from a pool of shared data; Verizon Wireless has announced their intention to launch similar multi-device plans. Given the expected growth of data traffic from tablets, what better way for operators to create stickier customers than by offering all-in-one plans?
Bringing all these trends and market dynamics into perspective, tablets are quickly assuming a role as an essential but supplementary multimedia consumption device rather than a direct smartphone or laptop replacement. If all the stars continue to align, these connected tablets promise to drive another surge of rich-media broadband traffic over mobile networks in coming years and may even eclipse smartphone and laptop users in terms of bandwidth consumption. So tablets represent a significant business opportunity and challenge for service providers. Mobile operators with robust networks, innovative enabling services, compelling device offerings and attractive multi-device service plans - anchored by a comprehensive data optimization strategy - will be in a good position to reap the bounty.
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Posted: 9/29/2011 11:00:00 AM | Author: Scott Larson | Send Feedback
Category: Services, Economics, and Technologies
While LTE/4G investments and service inaugurations continue to garner the majority of media headlines, a recent GSM/3G Market Update report from the GSA makes it very clear that the success of mobile broadband is being built upon a solid and growing HSPA/HSPA+ foundation (not to be didactic, but certain established operators have welcomed HSPA+ into the 4G marketing club). The migration from HSPA to HSPA+ continues to be the dominant industry trend globally (the GSA estimates over 170 HSPA+ commercial deployments by the end of this year) and the market boasts the availability of 3,227 different HSPA devices. As evidenced in other industry analysis, it will be years before LTE subscriptions compete with HSPA/HSPA+ market share. And affirming HSPA's workhorse role in the mobile broadband landscape, almost every operator outside the Nordic region is expected to rely on HSPA for their LTE 'roaming' coverage and fallback (i.e., anywhere outside major urban centers) for the next five to ten years. These facts may not be too sexy, but we do find them rather impressive.
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Posted: 9/21/2011 11:45:00 AM | Author: Scott Hilton | Send Feedback
Category: Mobile Broadband Optimization Landscape
In previous blog posts we addressed how optimizing the delivery of video over mobile broadband is a key to providing a good user experience and ensuring efficient use of network resources. The tendency of viewers to abandon videos mid-stream is one aspect of user behavior that mobile operators can exploit to increase network efficiencies as demand for video increases.
We are all guilty of attention-deficit surfing behavior: randomly bouncing among videos on popular social networking, news, and entertainment websites, rarely patient enough to view entire clips. Since the video server and client device tend to deliver and buffer the video well ahead of the viewing rate (also called the encoding rate) of the video itself, video abandonment can result in a waste of precious bandwidth and significant amounts of data dropped along the way.
Our traffic studies of live HSPA+ networks in 2011 confirm the dramatic effects of this user behavior. The following charts show the behavior of users streaming video sessions from a single base station. The analysis in this case is based on Flash video, the dominant video encoding format today.
The distribution chart above reveals the following:
- Only ~35% of videos are watched to completion (far right vertical line)
- 50% of videos are viewed for less than 40% of their total length
- 20% of videos are viewed for less than 10% of their total length
These trends point to wasted bandwidth when the encoding rates are compared to the transport rates for these videos in the chart below:
- For this sample of videos, the range of encoding rates is rather small (~500 Kbps to 750 Kbps), while the transport rate varies greatly (~500 Kbps to over 3 Mbps).
- Only a small percentage of video sessions match encoding rate to transport rate (<20%)
- The median difference between the encoding and transport rates is ~500 Kbps, which implies that every abandoned second of a video represents 500 Kbits or 62.5 Kbytes of wasted capacity.
Further analysis shows that an average video session wastes almost 1 MB because of poor matching between the encoding rate and the transport rate and early abandonment of the session. This significant inefficiency leads to higher levels of congestion and a degraded user experience.
The industry and operators have recognized the need to better match the transport and encoding rates and "over-buffering" of user videos - especially in times of high network use and congestion. Two approaches are currently being implemented:
- Video Pacing - This involves the use of various techniques to better match transport rates to the encoding rates of streaming videos. By more closely managing the user buffer depth, less instantaneous transport bandwidth is required and fewer bytes are wasted if a user abandons the video. Video pacing techniques include buffering and rate-shaping in the network, split-session video servers, and TCP session optimization to rate shape the streams. These techniques require specific knowledge of the video meta-data, client and server capabilities, and network conditions in order to prevent negative user impact (for instance, choppy or stalled video resulting from buffers not deep enough to accommodate network variability).
- Adaptive Streaming - This is separate and distinct from video pacing in that it attempts to provide the best user experience (highest video quality with lowest stalling/stopping of videos) by adaptively changing the encoding rate based on the available transport rate to the client. This approach is being actively pursued by the dominant video player vendors (Microsoft Silverlight, Adobe Flash, and Apple QuickTime) and standards bodies (HTML5). Major Internet video sources such as Netflix.com and Hulu.com already support adaptive streaming. In its most basic form, the adaptive streaming video client monitors its buffers to determine if the available network bandwidth (transport rate) is sufficient to support the video stream encoding rate. If the transport rate is low (i.e., the buffer is draining too quickly), the client requests a lower quality stream from the server to better match the rates. Correspondingly, if the transport rate is high (buffer filling too quickly), the client requests a higher quality stream.
In some respects, these two schemes are in conflict. Video pacing takes the network perspective and attempts to optimize the network resources needed to deliver a video stream whereas adaptive streaming takes the user perspective and attempts to deliver the highest bit-rate quality for a given network condition. Nevertheless, the two techniques can be used together to provide the best overall user experience for a collection of users (not just a single user) in the face of constrained network bandwidth. Video pacing and adaptive streaming represent just a couple of the many tools and techniques operators can use to better manage the unpredictable data behavior in their networks. Without content and flow optimization at critical points in the network, congestion and its resulting user impact will occur more frequently and lead to expensive over-building of the network and costly subscriber churn.
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Posted: 8/31/2011 4:45:00 PM | Author: Talbot Hack | Send Feedback
Category: Services, Economics, and Technologies
Earlier this month Vodafone Germany announced a plan to start migrating all 4 million of its DSL subscribers to their LTE network using a combination of service bundles and incentives. Although the company signaled to the financial markets months ago that it intends to favor investment in LTE over fixed-line infrastructure going forward, the significance of this latest announcement goes deeper than the headline.
HSPA is the first mobile broadband technology to credibly compete against fixed broadband, however many subscribers still rely on a cable or DSL connection for TV and even for primary Internet access due to coverage, bandwidth, or service limitations. Vodafone's announcement implies they are confident their LTE network - which already serves 4 million businesses and households across Germany - will overcome any perceived shortcomings of HSPA and enable them to compete directly against 'fixed' services. Vodafone's instincts are right. And no doubt their experience in the large, developed German market will influence their plans in their other key markets. In a sense, Vodafone is betting fixed-mobile substitution (for all services) will finally become a reality.
And until Vodafone's announcement, most major mobile operators considered complementary fixed services as an essential bundling strategy to attract new subscribers and make existing ones more sticky. As recently as mid-2008, when it acquired the remaining 26.4% of German DSL provider ARCOR it didn't already own, Vodafone Group was aggressively pursuing this fixed-mobile integration strategy as a way to bolster its HSPA offerings. Vodafone Germany's latest move is partly attributable to the excessive fees they must pay for unbundled local loop (DSL) access, however CEO Vittorio Colao's team has been steadily divesting less profitable, non-strategic assets for the past two years, and they apparently now lump the German DSL investment into this category. This could presage a broader industry shift away from accepted doctrine about the value of fixed-mobile integration efforts.
Vodafone's decision also underscores how mobile data traffic continues to drive operator revenues and business decisions, and how, as more operators roll out and expand LTE services, many of the data traffic management challenges they face today with HSPA - most notably in the UTRAN - will persist and even amplify with LTE.
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Posted: 8/9/2011 11:45:00 AM | Author: Scott Larson | Send Feedback
Category: Trends in Devices, Applications, and Content
While most would agree that mobile communications have become an integral part of our everyday personal and professional lives, it now appears an increasing number of users view their mobile devices as indispensible, exhibiting behavioral characteristics consistent with addiction: The state of being enslaved to a habit or practice or to something that is psychologically or physically habit-forming, to such an extent that its cessation causes severe trauma.
According to a recent report from telecoms regulator Ofcom providing data and analysis on the UK communications sector, 60% of teenagers and 37% of adults describe themselves as "highly addicted" to their smartphones, whose multi-purpose use is gradually cannibalizing other activities including using a PC to access the Internet, reading newspapers and books, and even watching TV.
Another online survey conducted by the Guardian echoes the findings in the Ofcom report, with 58.7% of respondents claiming that they take their smartphone everywhere they go. Everywhere. (Emphasis theirs, not mine!) And the Pew Research Center added another perspective on mobile broadband dependence with recent market data that indicates two-thirds of U.S. smartphone users sleep with their phones right next to their bed.
With smartphone and tablet adoption rates poised to grow significantly and mobile applications permeating every facet of our lives, the number of users (mobile junkies?) who develop a high level of intimacy and attachment to their mobile devices will also likely increase. This addiction not only portends heightened demand for mobile data, but also heightened service expectations as popular mobile applications, in particular video, become an increasingly important part of users' online experience.
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