Make it Mobile

When voice went mobile, it revolutionized your business. Mobile broadband is doing the same for data, and that promises to revolutionize the world.

The opportunities ahead are immense. The PC market has moved from the desktop to the laptop, notebook and netbook, with portable computers now accounting for most PC sales. And customers want good connections. But existing copper infrastructure is often limited to 1 Mbps. In Southeast Asia, there are more than 700 million people – and only 40 million fixed lines.

The only way to cope is with mobile broadband. It solves the last-mile challenge.

And taking data services beyond the range of the fixed network has immense benefits for society. We have seen how HSPA networks in India and Bangladesh have brought remote villages access to medical care and advanced educational training, often for the first time.

But it goes beyond PCs. The success of the iPhone and other smartphones shows how connecting to broadband opens up a new business ecosystem, and how to increase ARPU. These devices are what we dreamed about when the world launched WAP. But this time people love it.

Mobile broadband opens up many new revenue streams. We keep hearing how newspapers are dying. But 50 major US papers are available in electronic format for Amazon’s Kindle. And operators are getting a share of the revenues. Embedded modules in cameras, for example, mean photos can be sent straight to a digital picture frame – over your network.

Even machines need to talk to each other. Sectors such as health care, transport and utilities are all seeing how they can benefit from connectivity. Automated emergency-call systems in cars are expected to reduce road fatalities in Europe by 10 percent. It doesn’t make sense for all of these sectors to build their own networks. You can make sure they use yours.

There are challenges too. One early one was access to terminals. Good 3G handsets were expensive and hard to find. But that is no longer a problem. Now there are thousands of devices, from low-end models to top-end smartphones, as well as PCs with built-in broadband modules.

A continuing issue, however, is backhaul. With so much extra traffic, backhaul is becoming a bottleneck. Immature transport networks benefit from introducing IP, which cuts costs and opens up capacity. So there is a plus there too: bringing down the cost per bit paves the way for massive traffic growth.

The access network is both a challenge and an opportunity. Advances such as HSPA are bringing peak rates measured in tens of Megabits per second over the air. But with PC users now going mobile, some are consuming Gigabytes of capacity every month. You need to continue to improve spectrum efficiency, taking it to a new level using HSPA and later LTE.

But success brings its own challenges. With mobile broadband, 5 percent of subscribers can consume 80 to 90 percent of network resources – without paying their share of the costs. Clever service differentiation and traffic handling in the network can make sure people get what they pay for, and pay for what they get.

Good traffic handling and service differentiation can cut costs by up to 50 percent without affecting perceived quality, and increase revenues through new service levels.

It’s a new world out there, playing by new rules. When mobile broadband turns the world upside-down, you want to make sure you end up on top.

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