We’re seeing lots of wishful thinking in the industry around being able to monetize QoS (Quality of Service) for consumer services. In part its coming from the current LTE (Long Term Evolution) sales push, which has an overly complex set of QoS capabilities given the limitations of the air interface. As well as the summer […]
This old weblog article from 2008 discusses the cost structure of a typical mobile operator, and I show below the structure graphically. The key figure is transport costs (backhaul) are roughly 7% of total costs back in 2008. Some operators have seen that jump to over 15%-20% of total costs in under 2 years. The […]
North America is an exception in the mobile broadband (MBB) market amongst developed nations. At the end of Q1 2009 there were 17.3 million data-only HSPA subscriptions in Europe, 14% of all broadband connections are now mobile and mobile is growing at 5 times the rate of fixed broadband. Depending on how you calculate it, […]
In the article Reinventing the On Device Portal – The App Store, I reviewed how Apple’s implementation of its App Store on the iPhone provides a template for operators and how the struggling ODP (On Device Portal) can come into its own. I’ve reviewed the ODP landscape, its struggles and evolution in previous weblog articles. […]
In my journeys around APAC (Asia Pacific region) over the past few months, a common theme is the explosion of mobile broadband (MBB), as reported in previous articles in this weblog such as Mobile Broadband Explosion, The Internet’s Gone Video, and Mobile and DSL Broadband Compared. However, the impact of that explosion on the operator […]
The GSMA reported in August there are now 4 million new HSPA (High Speed Packet Access) subscribers a month. The total number of HSPA users has passed the 50 million mark globally from 11 million a year ago. Mobile Broadband is definitely taking off, as discussed in this previous weblog article. When I was in […]
This article follows on from a previous article that reviewed LTE (Long Term Evolution, also know as 4G). Several people asked why I had not included a fuller discussion on the 4G core in that article. It is because LTE is an access technology; my focus of the article was on the access where there […]
LTE (Long Term Evolution, also known as 4G) is entering the hype-cycle, and being rapidly pushed up to the ‘peak of inflated expectations’, just like IMS (IP Multimedia Subsystem), PTT (Push To Talk), FMC (Fixed Mobile Convergence), and far too many other technologies to name here. So to cut through the hype and hopefully present […]
A mobile broadband Tipping Point has been reached: HSPA (High Speed Packet Access) is ‘good enough’ for customers and prices have fallen by a factor of 16 in less than two years. Three UK (H3G UK) now offers mobile broadband prepay, 10 GBP ($20) buys up to either 1GB or 1 month of access, and […]
Ovum predicts the number of HSDPA connections will reach 16.5 million by the end of 2008 in Western Europe, thanks in part to the simplicity of plugging in a USB HSDPA modem and it just working rather than the complex configurations and reboots of a data card; as well as the simplicity and attractiveness of […]