The U.S. mobile data market grew three percent quarter over quarter and 17 percent year over year to reach $19.9 billion worth of revenue in the third quarter of 2012, according to mobile analyst Chetan Sharma. That’s the good news: mobile data continues to drive revenue growth as messaging and voice revenue matures.
Data is now almost 43 percent of U.S. mobile industry service revenue. But the possibly troubling implication is that the industry is about half way to saturating the mobile data market.
If you want to know why mobile service providers are launching mobile payments, mobile wallet, mobile banking or mobile commerce initiatives, or machine-to-machine services, that is the reason. Another wave of revenue growth, big enough to displace voice, messaging and even mobile broadband, is necessary.
Most western markets have seen messaging revenue decline, though up to this point the U.S. market has resisted the trend. But in the third quarter, for the first time, there was a decline in both the total number of messages sent and received, as well as total messaging revenue.
Voice traffic will dip below 10 percent of the overall traffic in 2012 (revenue is another matter).
For much of the last three decades, voice has dominated the revenue streams for almost all operators, Sharma argues.
In 2013, global voice revenues will fall below 60 percent. So far, the drop in voice revenues has been matched by the rise of messaging revenues and mobile data. But mobile data also will reach saturation at some point, raising the question of what comes next.
The answer to that question is not yet clear. But most observers believe some combination of new applications, using network resources as an input, must be a large part of the answer.
No comments:
Post a Comment