Mobile data growth and voice revenue
Vodacom executive, Jannie van Zyl predicts that the main growth driver in the mobile data market will be data hungry smartphones, fuelled by an increase in multimedia consumption.
“Today we already have more than five million smartphones on the network, and they are the most data intensive of all devices with phones like the iPhone equaling the typical data consumption of modems,” said van Zyl.
“The drivers of data consumption clearly are multimedia content and social networking services such as Facebook. It’s become clear that there is some kind of perverted desire to see photos of what other people are eating and this is driving data usage via sites like Facebook,” said van Zyl.
He added that feature phones, which can run a range of applications, should also not be discounted. “We’ve got nearly 9 million feature phones on the Vodacom network,” said van Zyl.
There is a risk for mobile operators that the migration from voice to data may result in a loss of revenue, but van Zyl said that it is a long process which should not be feared.
“For sure there will be a migration from voice to data as the main contributor of mobile revenue and this process is in full swing. But it will take a long time as it’s a numbers game,” said van Zyl.
“Today we still have many more non-data or features phones than smartphones in the network and it’s really only with a smartphone that these services come into their own right. So it will happen without a doubt, but it is just as certain that it’ll be a evolutionary process and not something that will happen overnight.”
Van Zyl also downplayed a potential disruption from Voice over Data products using Voice over IP (VoIP) technology.
“Regarding Voice over Data, the issue really is that the underlying bearer should not be of any concern to the user. If you use voice over circuit switching (CS), or over IP or even over LTE, the consumer wants a quality service irrespective of the bearer and will be willing to pay for some level of quality of service (QoS),” said van Zyl.
“Most, if not all, VoIP services today are best-effort at best and pretty crappy at worst. They might make sense if you’re chatting to your grandmother in London but for a business call in South Africa, you’d want a quality service.”
“To deliver this will require specific network investments and thus a QoS VoIP call would be similar in cost to a CS call today,” said van Zyl.
Related articles
Loading ...