What is the "Value" of the Fixed Access Network

Studies of smart phone user behavior confirm what most of us might have concluded, namely that Wi-Fi has become a key access method for smart phone users, and provides the answer to a question some might now be asking about the respective roles of mobile and fixed access networks.

That there are synergies between mobile and fixed networks is incontestable. All forms of access, whether fixed, untethered or mobile, are essentially “tail circuits” that connect users to core networks.

What is harder to determine is precisely where those synergies exist, and how big the synergy might be, when considering the highest value provided by fixed access, as compared to mobile access.

That issue increasingly is important as most people, in virtually all markets, rely on smart phones, potentially raising the issue of mobile substitution for the fixed network, and as fast mobile networks using Long Term Evolution create, in a new way, a chance to substitute mobile networks for Internet access that formerly would really have made sense only on a fixed network.

In other words, the growing question is “what is the value of the fixed network.”

Support for video entertainment, and consumption of large amounts of bandwidth at low cost, to support multiple users, emerges as perhaps the defining “value” of a fixed access connection. The key issue is that, increasingly, most digital appliances used in the home or at work use Wi-Fi, which is a wireless tail for a fixed network.

Android smart phone users tracked for a year by NPD Connected Intelligence use between half a gigabyte a month to about 1 Gbyte a month of mobile network data. Apple iPhone users tend to use a bit more.

Though the data might reflect the smaller number of iPhone users in the sample, consumption tended to run between 0.75 Gbytes a month up to about two gigabytes a month. By December 2012, though, Apple iPhone users were consuming data at about the same rate as Android users.

U.K. Android users send and receive 78% of all their data over WiFi networks, according to Nielsen, which also tracked the data usage of about 1,500 Android users.

Nielsen’s analysis suggests as much as 78 percent of all data consumed by users is using a Wi-Fi connection of some sort.

Data collected by Mobidia shows that Wi-Fi usage is close to ubiquitous in developed markets, where more than 90 percent of smart phone users also use Wi-Fi as a means of data connectivity. In Hong Kong and the Netherlands, use of Wi-Fi by smart phone users is over 98 percent.