In 2014, 80% of Broadband Access Will Be Mobile, says Huawei

By 2014, 80 percent of the world's two billion broadband users will be using mobile networks for their access, says Huawei. Of those two billion users, 1.5 billion will be first-time subscribers.

Predictions such as that are one reason regulators and suppliers need to be much more cognizant of how much is changing in the global communications business. Policies that relate to broadband access and deployment must reorient to reflect user behavior and supply that will be overwhelmingly mobility-based in just a few years.

Huawei also points out that voice services revenues also are steadily declining."In the past five years, the revenue for fixed voice services decreased by 15 percent, reflected by a decreasing growth rate for mobile voice services in 2009," Huawei says.

If that is a fundamental trend, as Huawei believes it is, then policies cannot be designed on the assumption that voice revenues, traditionally the underpinning for the whole global business, will continue to do so in the future.

In other words, instead of assuming service providers are powerful gatekeepers who need to be restrained, it might be more apt to view them as endangered suppliers who must replace the bulk of their revenues over the next decade or so, simply to remain in business. That certainly is not how telecom companies have been viewed in the past, but to ignore the changes could be dangerous.

U.S. regulators were so intent on introducing more competition in voice services in the early 1990s that they nearly completely missed the fact that the Internet, broadband and over-the-top applications and services were about to change the industry. Basically, the intended market result was to cause incumbents to lose market share while competitors were to gain share, precisely at the point that nearly every competitor was about to face a declining market for voice services.

It takes little insight to observe that a narrow focus on fixed broadband might likewise be dangerous at a time when usage is shifting so profoundly to mobile modes.

To use an analogy, regulators must resist the temptation to "fight the last war," rather than the different new war that is coming.