Communications

2 Billion Mobile Subs

According to Wireless Intelligence (subscription required), the global number of cellular mobile telephone subscribers surpassed two billion this weekend. Of course these are estimates -- it will be a few years before we have more solid data. But it's credible. Wireless Intelligence is a joint venture of the market research firm Ovum and the GSM Association.  As a trade association, the GSM Association may lean to an optimistic view, but Ovum is a market research firm that I've had experience with, and consider independent and credible.

We only reached one billion subscribers in mid-2002 (20 years after the first analog cellular telephony trials), so it's pretty impressive to pick up the next one billion in only three years.

Telecom Disruption, Skype and eCommerce 2.0

The latest issue of the NMS Telecom Innovator's News includes an article I wrote a few weeks ago, "Skype's part in Telecom Disruption." The focus is on disruptions in the Clayton Christensen sense.  There are three:

1. Personal telecom, i.e. mobile phones - already in process for 15+ years
2. Rich communications, i.e. instant messaging, Skype, GoogleTalk - underway for a few years now
3. eCommerce 2.0, i.e. telecom becomes a free adjunct of eCommerce - still a speculative idea

When I wrote the article, GoogleTalk had just been announced and I had written this. Luckily I got to edit that last paragraph at the last moment, as the eBay-Skype acquisition (presentation & webcast) is more credible as a leading indicator for eCommerce 2.0.

Walled Gardens - Cracks appear

In today's issue of UK publication WAP Insight,

Details seem to have leaked out concerning breaches in 3 UK's 'walled garden' approach to mobile Internet access. The UK operator looks set to offer two new services – Mobile Web and Wireless Web. .... At present 3 UK users can't break out of the operator's portal. According to a report in Mobile magazine, initially Mobile Web will only be made available to contract customers and will cost an additional £2.50 per month for up to 5MB of data downloads. It says the Wireless Web service will cost customers £45 a month and provide for up to 512MB of data downloads. .... It looks suspiciously like 3 UK's response to Vodafone's Mobile Connect offering...

This is an area where the US mobile market is ahead of the EU.  Verizon, Sprint and Cingular already offer Internet access, at flat rates, with no explicit data limit. For example, Verizon Wireless' BroadbandAccess package promises "unlimited" data for $59.99 per month (assuming you also have a voice plan...).  Of course there are many strings attached, e.g. Verizon's language:

BroadbandAccess services cannot be used (1) for uploading, downloading or streaming of movies, music or games, (2) with server devices or with host computer applications, including, but not limited to, Web camera posts or broadcasts, automatic data feeds, Voice over IP (VoIP), automated machine-to-machine connections, or peer-to-peer (P2P) file sharing, or (3) as a substitute or backup for private lines or dedicated data connections.

But still, the walls are down in a practical sense and flat rate pricing has arrived. Yes, there will be instances of VoIP blocking and selective enforcement against high bandwidth users, but the Internet is no longer walled off and the P2P community has proved that any opening is enough to support a rich set of applications.

NMS Developers Conference Munich

I'm leaving tonight for Munich where I'll be participating in the NMS Developers Conference - Europe. This is a conference for developers using or considering use of NMS technologies, so it's more like a family event. Historically, these conferences have been a great way for me to connect with a diverse set of developers and a diverse set of telecom applications.  I'm looking forward to this trip!  (besides central Munich is a great venue).

And, this is just the first of three such conferences (Europe, Americas, Asia) over the next months, so there's more interesting days ahead. 

Google going after Pay-per-Call advertising??

Since Google's public offering, there's been fairly wide discussion of the shifts taking place in advertising. Google, Yahoo, and to a lesser extent MSN, Ask Jeeves and others, make major revenues selling advertising on their Internet sites. Among their innovations are Pay-per-Click and bidding for ad placement, i.e. advertising costs set by on-line auction. Google is not only selling ad space, with their AdSense program they are acting like an advertising agency, placing sponsored links and other ads on third-party web sites in exchange for a cut of the advertising revenues.

Today I stumbled on this article, Google takes ad sales to print, in last week's CNET Tech News.  Apparently Google is expanding into print media.  They are now buying bulk space in conventional print media, subdividing it and reselling it (with value-added services) to their advertising clients. This is interesting as a media buyer gets more margin than a media broker, but what I found especially interesting was this value-added service:

AHS Systems President Jeff Witkowski...said, ...Google is "doing a ton of tracking on this. They're using their own 1-800 numbers on this, and it forwards to our line." The Internet addresses of the online versions of the ads also redirect traffic through Google servers.

It appears they are extending the click-thru model to more traditional consumer response channels.  To me that suggests Pay-per-Call as a logical extension of their existing Pay-per-Click model.

More interesting (for those of us in telecom), Google is getting into the business of receiving and redirecting telephone calls.

What better reason for Google to get into the voice telephony business?

And given a desire to enter telephony, what better way than to follow the lead of the most innovative VoIP solution, i.e. Skype?

Business motivations for IMS

I've written about the over-hyping of IMS (IP Multimedia Subsystem), but there are business drivers that will result in the wide deployment of pre-IMS, IMS and IMS-like systems.  A few weeks ago I wrote an article, More Telecom Upheaval, which was recently published by CIO Update about one of those business drivers.

In developed countries, mobile phone operators are running out of new prospects (already there are more mobile phones than people in Sweden). New data services may increase the average revenue per user, but there’s a limit to consumers’ budgets.

And while battles for market share help consumers, they’re costly and provide limited growth for operators. But there’s one enormous revenue base that’s ripe for disruption — traditional fixed-line operators.

The way for mobile operators to get at this revenue base is via fixed-mobile convergence and IMS is the likely platform, at least for the next few years.  See the article for details...