With a billion mobile handsets sold each year at an average of over $100 apiece, this is a lucrative, $100 billion dollar plus market. Tens of handset manufacturers, hundreds of network operators, and thousands of other businesses are deriving sustenance from the mobile handset market. Whether it is hardware sales, mobile services, software development, distribution, retailing or support, the list of monetization opportunities afforded by the handsets expands by the year. Mobile Virtual Network Operators (see AMP’d), high-profile consumer brands (see MTV), value added distributors (see Brightpoint), and customized design manufacturers (see Modelabs)are just some of the new entrants into the lucrative mobile services industry.
This is a market of huge proportions, yet one where the opportunities are always balanced by the challenges of an ever changing technological and commercial landscape. The mobile handset industry has its own, often surprising dynamics; in fact it shows greater similarity to the watch-making than to the PC industry. Understanding the competitive technology landscape, complex market dynamics, and the evolving market trends of the mobile handset business is no small undertaking. Yet, it is a prerequisite for any company looking to venture into or maneuver within the mobile handset space.
Recognizing the importance and complexity of this topic, Eogogics has introduced a new course aimed at understanding the mobile handset industry. This course is for those new to the industry looking for an industry "101", those in the industry who wish to gain a competitive advantage through an enhanced understanding of the market process, as well as the industry watchers and analysts who need to make sense of corporate strategies and industry trends.
The two-day course, called Understanding the Mobile Handset Industry: Technology Landscape, Market Dynamics, and Trends, dissects the mobile ecosystem into its key players, analyzes the balance of power between them, highlights the regional differences, and profiles the key movers and shakers. It then presents the complex process of handset commercialization and the stakeholders involved in this process. The complete map of handset technologies and the associated vendor landscape - crucial to understanding the possibilities and limitations inherent in delivering commercial services to mobile handsets - is presented next. Network services, from the traditional SMS, to today’s content and tomorrow’s profiling and recommendation services are also discussed. The course ends with a detailed analysis of the market trends, the promising new players entering the game, and the many opportunities presented by the evolving marketplace. Whether you're new to the industry or an old hand, you will go away with a better understanding of the forces shaping the mobile handset industry.
It’s not easy to be a mobile industry executive in a developed country at this time. As a matter of fact, a wireless exec’s life has never been more complex. Just when the wireless carriers are starting to look at service differentiation made possible by 3G technologies, the subscriber penetration is starting to slow and the shareholders are starting to ask for higher OBIDA margins. If these three aspects of our business seem at odds with one another, it’s because they are.
In the developed world, voice ARPUs are generally flat to declining, though data revenue has been on the rise. However, since 3G data services have different usage patterns than voice, the margin for a 3G data session is going to be different than that for a voice call. Put another way, the margin a mobile carrier makes for a 2G voice call is different than that for a 2G SMS message and different yet from that for a 3G voice call, or a 3G email, or a 3G video session… You got the point.
This leads us right into a strategic discussion of how to monetize assets for 3G and so-called 4G with the addition of new services. For carriers who envision fixed/mobile convergence, especially in the case of IPTV and Mobile TV, the differences in the technologies with respect to contention will yield vastly different margins for the same service offerings. Because the wireless spectrum is a highly contended resource, higher reuse of this resource by subscribers with short duration calls creates higher monetization of the asset and therefore, better margin. In the case of DSL, the last mile is a non-contended resource, unless of course your kids are upstairs downloading games off the Internet. All of this means that, for margin parity, the carrier’s cost of content to be delivered to the subscriber, for example video, via a mobile network must be less than the cost of the same, exact content delivered via an IPTV network.
Moreover, with new technologies such as IMS becoming available for the mobile network, the question arises as to whether to maintain the legacy technologies or migrate to what’s new. This means that the business case for IMS isn’t limited to a mixture of new data services, but is also measured against the cost reduction targets for the delivery of legacy services, such as voice. The question that mobile operators must answer is not “when” or “if” but “how” to cap the legacy networks and grow them into packet-oriented, 3G or 4G/IMS based network to be able to provide both new mobile services as well as juiced up OBIDA margins at levels that drive increased shareholder value.
All of this forces those making current investment decisions to pause and answer questions on every stage and aspect of the network, from the radio modulation, to policy management, to transport options across the RAN and backbone that can be wholly or partly re-used in support of the LTE vision of an ultra-flat network.
I realize I have raised more questions than answered, but for something as complex as carrier economics, that’s about all one can hope to accomplish in a short article. You can read more about IMS in our IMS tutorial. For courses on 3G/4G, IMS, and 3G/IMS economics, check out the following links:
If, on the other hand, you are looking for some solutions to your network evolution economics issues, shoot us an email at john@eogogics.com.
Providing voice, Internet, and content/video to subscribers on the move without the need for a cable to access the network has been a major ambition of most telecom operators. Quadruple play is the marketing buzzword for a service that combines the triple play of broadband Internet, television, and telephone with the mobility afforded by wireless.
Recent advances in wireless technologies such as OFDM (Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiple Access) and MIMO (Multiple Input Multiple Output) antenna systems, along with other radio techniques, offer the ability to transfer information over a wireless link rapidly, at great distances, and in non- line-of-sight conditions. The emergence of these technologies means that one would never need to be connected by a wire to anything, even while at home.
These technologies are supported by major wireless standard groups like the IEEE and 3GPP/3GPP2 as well as wireless equipment vendors like Nortel, Ericsson, Lucent, and Nokia. They have adopted these technologies to develop global standards for future wireless communications that can deliver quadruple play services. These services can be delivered to mobile users using wireless networks that will evolve from the HSDPA/HSUPA networks now being deployed and are named “3G Long Term Evolution” or, as more commonly known, Super 3G.
3G LTE or Super 3G radio networks, planned for deployment in 2008-2010, seek to offer a real quad-play experience to mobile users. They will introduce mobile subscribers to bundled services that combine broadband Internet, television, and telephone. The real boom though will take place with the introduction of 4G wireless networks where mobile users will have seamless access to all of the different wireless network technologies, with seamless handover and roaming from one to the other without service discontinuity!
The deployment timeframe of 4G wireless networks is going to be sometime between 2010 and 2015. New services using 4G networks are going to radically change the wireless scene and how users will use their mobile devices to access these services.
Editor’s Note: The author teaches Eogogics’s 3G LTE/4G courses.
tags: ]]>Here are some examples of such Training:
What’s the ideal platform for such training? To answer that question, we need to examine the characteristics of compliance training. It’s required by large numbers of people, often within a short timeframe, and is often repetitive. And, of course, it demands good record keeping. E-learning has the ability to perform volume training quickly and cost effectively, even when there are one or two participants per location. It’s also just-in-time and self-paced, allowing it to be more easily squeezed into a crowded schedule. All that makes e-learning the ideal vehicle for compliance training. What about the records? When e-learning is delivered from an LMS, record-keeping is automatic and effortless!
Now, what’s this LMS? A Learning Management System is software that allows you to catalog all of your training offerings, whether instructor-led or self-paced, as well as track the progress of everyone taking these courses – anywhere at any time in your company. LMSs, while quite useful, don’t come cheap. They can be pricey, ranging in cost from many thousands to millions of dollars, and can be hard to select, customize, install, and operate.
Does it ever make sense to offer instructor-led training (ILT) classes on compliance issues? There’s no better training than an ILT class taught well! There are topics related to people issues, for instance cultural diversity and sexual harassment, that can be taught with much greater impact in an ILT setting.
So how do you implement compliance e-learning and an LMS without going broke? Eogogics offers online course libraries for most of the compliance training needs. We also offer high-impact ILT courses on sensitive compliance issues along with knowledgeable blended learning consultants who can help put it all together into packages that score high on the quality/effectiveness scale but are easy on your budget. By the way, our e-learning courses are the same as those sold by well-known e-learning companies. We just sell them for less. Another bonus: All of our e-learning libraries come with a built-in LMS – FREE! What more could you ask for? Give us a call, so we can help you get a compliance training program going in your company without delay.
tags: ]]>The matter has received some international press coverage, including the US, but obviously not nearly as much as in Greece. While the investigation as to what happened, who did what, why, how, etc., is ongoing, some have dubbed this matter the ‘Greek Watergate’. The role of the government in this episode is less than clear. What is clear is that the Greek government was notified by Vodafone of the breach in March 2005 but did not disclose the issue until recently. While the political issues are plentiful and intriguing enough, our focus is more on the technical issues as the system that was breached was the GSM system, the most widely used mobile communications system in the world.
Apparently what happened is pretty straightforward. Someone implanted some code into the MSC that would get triggered every time a call was made to or from a set of mobiles. Interestingly enough the set included the mobiles of prominent politicians and other leaders, including the Prime Minister himself. Having been triggered, it apparently “routed” the call to one of a handful of mobiles where a recording device recorded the conversation. Who “patched” the MSC, why, how, and with whose knowledge and permission are matters that remain very murky. Add to the mix the death of a Vodafone employee right around the time the breach was disclosed to the government in March 2005 (not a typo; yes, almost a year ago)---a death that at the time was ruled a suicide and is now under review---and the problem becomes that much more difficult.
At a technical level, though, one must ask some simple questions. While GSM as well as subsequent systems, such as UMTS and cdma2000, have pretty strong encryption schemes in place, they only protect one at the air interface. In some sense, the air interface was perceived as being the most vulnerable “link” of the end-to-end conversation, but what happens ‘inside the network’? How was it even possible to implant some listening software into the MSC’s software without a bunch of alarms going off? If it happened once in Greece, is it reasonable to be concerned that it happened elsewhere or even that it’s happening as we speak?
What are the standards bodies and the vendors doing to prevent similar breaches in the future, within GSM but beyond it as well: UMTS, cdma2000, WiMAX, etc.? Your thoughts, whether on the politics or technology, are welcome!
tags: ]]>In the past few months, more than one newspaper has carried articles referring to the slow-down, if not demise, of the blogging phenomenon. (A WSJ story also talked about how some companies employ ghost bloggers living half-way around the world to “adapt” content found on other web sites that they can pass off as their original blogs for remunerations as low as a dollar an article.) What they are talking about though is blogging as a business. We may not see many more deals like the Time Warner acquisition of Weblogs Inc. for $25 million. However, the number of blogs, currently around 30 million, continues to quadruple every year. (Though, to be fair, the active blogs – those that get updated at least weekly – are only a tenth of that number.)
So why do we want to start a blog? I’m surrounded at Eogogics by people whose life and work experience has exposed them to interesting people and situations. They have stories to tell, of travel itineraries gone awry, harrowing encounters with overzealous airport officials, heartwarming hospitality in far away lands, comic misunderstandings that can arise when people of varied linguistic and cultural persuasions come together for business or after-hours pleasure, or interesting client-site experiences (not all of which can be told!). I know they have tales to recount because I’ve heard many of them at company socials, some more than once -- and I have to say they seem to get better with each telling. We’ll share with you, too, opinions, information, humor, surveys, quizzes, brain teasers and more.
This page is also a means for the reader, that’s you, to voice your thoughts and peeves and to share your stories with others. I encourage you to post your comments to the blogs. You’ll need to become a site member to be able to do that. I also invite you to e-mail your own blog contribution to blogsmeister@eogogics.com. I ask only that the contribution be original, generally related to the content of our web site, and be in good taste. All outside contributions accepted for publication will receive our thank-you and a $20 gift certificate. That’s a lot better than the wages received by the writers of some outsourced blogs. Happy blogging!
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