Global Broadband Access Market Up to $414 Billion by 2020

The global broadband access market, including both fixed and mobile modes, will increase from $274 billion in 2010 to $416 billion in 2020, an increase of 52 percent, according to the Telco 2.0 Initiative and Disruptive Analysis.

More than half the revenue growth will come from wholesale and “two-sided” fees for improved access capacity and quality. This could include fees paid by business partners who want access to network service provider features and services.

By 2020, mobile broadband will be worth $138 billion, or 32 percent of the total broadband access industry revenues.

The analysts predict growth of “bulk wholesale” revenues, where capacity might be purchased by a third party as a component of some other service. Services provided to electrical utilities or other parties with telemetry needs are other examples.

“Comes with data” business models such as used by Amazon Kindle to sell content also will play a bigger role. Here, a product vendor or service provider contracts for data capacity with the broadband provider, and bundles it in a combined offer while the user does not have a subscription or direct relationship with the telco.

“Slice and dice” wholesale is more complex, and more controversial. This involves operators selling data capacity in fine-grained “parcels” to parties other than the user, who is typically also paying for some level of access.

This type of “two-sided” business model could involve deals with consumer electronics vendors for extra high-quality streams over existing broadband lines, or to content or application providers where they pick up the bill for data transmission rather than the end-user.

Any way one looks at the matter, it appears that various wholesale or enterprise revenues are going to be a bigger part of the overall mobile revenue stream in the future.