Mobile Data

The demand for mobile data is exploding, presenting operators with a unique opportunity to generate new revenue streams and grow their business. However revenue is not growing fast enough to ensure profitability. Not only is the mobile data traffic growing much faster than revenues, but the revenue growth rate also tends to decline over the years.

The explosion of mobile data traffic is causing capacity issues, driving operators to increase their investment in network resources to support such growth. The related cost is high but without an acceptable quality of service, operators would only drive customers away and would not be able to profit from this lucrative opportunity.

For instance, video represents the fastest growing traffic and operators are planning to capitalize on the popularity of video and offer services such as “TV Everywhere” which enables subscribers to watch TV programming on multiple devices. However, video consumes a lot of bandwidth and requires a high quality of service. The increased popularity of such services tends to accelerate the gap between the mobile data traffic and revenue growth.

As high speed, high bandwidth networks such as LTE are being deployed, they contribute to the growth of mobile data as they enable a mobile broadband experience similar to the home broadband experience.

Although we’ve seen that mobile data can increase revenues and APRU, a challenge is that the revenue uplift will not be enough to balance the cost of providing and maintaining networks to cater for the increases in mobile data traffic volumes. This major challenge must be resolved to capitalize on the mobile data opportunity and make it profitable.