While it might be difficult to describe the average revenue per account impact of 5G accounts, compared to 4G, it seems far easier to show revenue lift provided by fiber-to-home accounts, compared to copper-based accounts.
In large part, that is likely because FTTH allows sale of higher-priced access plans, which naturally generates higher revenue. Also, unlike the case for mobile account figures, home broadband is “service to a place,” so there is no effect of “multiple users” on recurring price.
In mobile scenarios, multiple users and devices might be supported on a single account, in the form of multi-user accounts, with “lines” or “numbers” ranging from two to some higher number.
For example, Ericsson suggests 5G boosts average revenue per user by less than five percent, even if many observers suggest ARPA drives significantly higher impact.
It remains unclear whether mobile operators might eventually shift to differentiated access speed plans for their mobile customers, as do home broadband providers.
There are clear business imperatives underlying each charging principle. The cost of supplying capacity on a fixed network is far lower than on a mobile network, traditionally, largely because fixed networks generally have more ability to add capacity (optical fiber bandwidth is almost infinite; mobile capacity is based on radio frequency resources that are inherently limited).
Traditionally, fixed networks have huge advantages where it comes to capacity and therefore cost per gigabit of consumption. While we might argue about the precise absolute retail cost of supplying capacity, mobile bandwidth has generally been about two orders of magnitude more expensive than fixed network bandwidth.
Under such circumstances, it makes sense that mobile operators “need” to manage consumption expectations, where fixed network operators can more easily consider “tiers of service” where higher-speed access is sold at higher prices.
Rarely will mobile operators, with their higher cost to supply capacity, have high incentives to encourage higher customer data consumption by offering higher-speed (and higher-priced) consumption tiers.
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