63% of Mobile Subs Are On Family Plans

Family Plans, offering a shared bucket of usage that multiples devices can share, have to  be judged one of the more important marketing innovations yet devised by the mobile industry.

About 63 percent of respondents to a recent survey conducted on behalf of Sprint Nextel said they were on such plans. Another 15 percent said they would consider joining such a plan. About 22 percent said they were not interested. 

Among the 22 percent of users are single people, who, by defintion, do not have family members to share buckets of usage with. 

Aside from that innovation, only the abolition of the difference between "local" and "long distance" calling rates had comparable impact on subscribership. 

33% of Wireless Users Say Mobile is "Only Phone I Need"

About a third of mobile users surveyed by Sprint Nextel say a mobile is the only phone they will ever need. About 76 percent say they would consider going "mobile only" because it is "more cost effective." 

Presumably that translates more or less directly with the notion that cutting a landline reduces cost. Still, there are indications that unified communications could be a problem solver as well.

About 36 percent say it is more convenient to receive calls on one line. About 33 percent of respondents say it more convenient to manage a single voice mail account. 

15% or 40%? WiMAX Share Could Hinge on Capital Markets

Whether WiMAX winds up being a 15-percent share or a 40-percent share of market might hinge on developments in the credit markets, in particular as it affects the fortunes of smaller and independent providers, says Paul Obsitnik, BridgeWave SVP.

Most observers think Clearwire is going to get the funding it requires, one way or the other. But “if credit markets stay frozen for 18 to 24 months,” it could be another matter. Of course, we might all agree that if that happens, we are all going to have problems bigger than WiMAX availability.

“If I had to bet, I’d say LTE will be the market share leader,” says Obsitnik, a prediction just about anybody would admit is the likely outcome, given the embrace Long Term Evolution has gotten by the global GSM mobile industry and even users of CDMA platforms.

“But WiMAX will have a good chunk of the fourth-generation business,” Obsitnik says.
“On WiMAX side, the big challenge is that it is difficult to build that much infrastructure very fast.”

But Obstinik says mobile broadband is a huge opportunity. “Every operator I’ve talked to sees a big usage explosion when unlimited plans are instituted,” he says. Some report that their demand is growing 100 percent every six to eight weeks.

The obvious challenge is to monetize that usage. “With full mobile broadband, all you can eat is an issue,” he notes. In a sense, Clearwire is unfettered because it is not cannibalizing a big installed voice base or existing mobile data revenue streams, he says.

That will make it easier to market plans where multiple devices can use a single bucket of usage, as voice and text messaging now are offered as part of family plans.

“We add value by providing ability to assist the scaling of networks more effectively,” Obsitnik says. TDM and SONET operations are an issue for cellular operators, who need to be careful about cutting over networks to IP. That’s why BridgeWave allows mobile operators to run both TDM and IP simultaneously, and then gradually shift, when LTE is a real-world commercial issue, he says.

I do think mobile side of the house is following the fixed line pattern, Obsitnik says. “First voice drives the model, then email, then Web, then video,” he says.

Truphone Now Available for Android G1

"Truphone Anywhere," an application for Android-enabled mobile handsets, is available now as a download on the Android Market in the U.K. and the U.S. markets.

A German version of Truphone Anywhere for Android is available and will be the first native language multi-communications application in the Android Market in Germany and Austria when it launches in March.

"Truphone Anywhere for Android" allows customers to take advantage of Truphone’s low international call rates, in addition to the cost of a local call.

Truphone customers can also easily instant-message their friends across a variety of networks including MSN, Yahoo!, Google Talk and Twitter from within one Android application. Customers can also call friends anywhere in the world on Google Talk for the price of a local call, and similarly will soon will be able to instant-message and call their friends on Skype.

Truphone is now available on Android, the Apple iPhone, the Apple iPod touch, Blackberry and Nokia devices.

Truphone Anywhere works in 33 countries around the world and reduces international call costs to as little as six cents a minute.

Unlike a calling card, Truphone Anywhere doesn’t require a user to remember what to do. Whenever an international number is dialled Truphone Anywhere simply asks whether the user wants to make a Truphone call. The user simply accepts, and Truphone connects the call.

Excel Offers Roadmap for Communications Service Providers, says Jaduka

Commodity voice now is part of a broader communications environment more focused on voice and communications as an attribute of many other experiences and applications, says Jaduka CEO Pete Pattullo. 

In part, that means creating the ability for direct integration of communications into business processes, even though stand-alone versions of voice will continue to be important. One example is how voice can be used to improve the efficiency of package deliveries. 

"We have a customer that delivers packages for which there must be a signature," says Pattullo. "So the company calls ahead, just before a delivery, to make sure packages can be delivered the first time, without return visits."

Application providers have to step up and create easy ways to "drag and drop" voice and communications features into existing applications. But app providers cannot do all the work, he says. The analogy is Microsoft Excel, where a tool allows end users to create their own custom spreadsheets.

Creating application program interfaces is a start, but the APIs are not, in themselves, a business model, Pattullo says. Service providers need more awareness of the actual business problems their customers have, to be able to create lots of applications using voice and communications features that are germane to users. 

Business VoIP: Lots of Hybrid Deployments

Only 34 percent of businesses with VoIP use it exclusively, and have no TDM infrastructure, according to analysts ar Research and Markets. VoIP is expected to be used by 74 percent of all U.S. businesses by 2012, Research and Markets projects.

Global Bandwidth: Video, Video, Video

Hibernia Atlantic CEo Bjarni Thorvardarson says trans-Atlantic routes now are driven by "video, video, video."

He's got that right. About 78 percent of global traffic now consists mostly of video, according to TeleGeography. 

Voice represents about one percent of traffic. And that illustrates a problem network services providers face. The one percent of traffic underpins the business model, while most of the video contributes little, if anything, beyond driving broadband access package upgrades.