Wireless Data Revenues on the rise August 10, 2006
Posted by Chetan in : 3G, AORTA, ARPU, Carriers, European Wireless Market, Japan Wireless Market, US Wireless Market, Worldwide Wireless Market , trackbackAll top 10 operators registered over $1B in data revenues for the first half of 2006. The carriers in order are NTT DoCoMo, China Mobile, KDDI, Verizon Wireless, Cingular Wireless, Sprint Nextel, O2 UK, Vodafone Japan, SK Telecom, and China Unicom. Some did with execution (like KDDI and DoCoMo), while others by sheer size of their customer base (Chinese carriers). For the first half, the top 10 carriers accounted for almost $24B in data revenues.
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It is interesting that in spite of a decent jump in data ARPU, the overall ARPU for carriers is still flat to declining (as in case of Sprint). The voice business is still under pressure to the level that it is not getting compensated by the increase in data revenue. Now, with new technoloogies on the horizon like voice-over-WiFi and VoIP in general, there is a risk of moving even more voice traffic away from cellular. The question now is (in an IP world)- can carriers start displacing the landline data traffic similar to how they successfully displaced landline voice traffic? In order for them to do that, carriers need to provide higher throughputs, higher availability at fraction of cost. Will 4G technologies (especially wiMax) provide that holy grail to carriers? Let me know your thoughts.
-Sunil
Broadband technologies are expected to drop the cost of delivering voice, so while the ARPU might continue to decrease or stay flat,
the costs to deliver will go down and hence impact the bottom line.