T-Mobile USA Defends Network

Neville Ray, the Chief Technology Officer of T-Mobile USA, says the company is in "no rush" to activate a fourth-generation network right away.

Observers will point out that T-Mobile USA is making the best of a bad situation: it has no 4G spectrum, and continues to work on how to get it. So making a virtue out of necessity is not a bad way to go. Beyond the positioning, there are some practical issues.

T-Mobile USA points out that handset selection initially will be limited, and that it is possible battery life and other issues could complicate end user experience.

Also, to the extent that the immediate advantage for a user is "more speed," so long as T-Mobile USA can keep up in the bandwidth area--actual experience, not marketing headlines--the advantages of broader handset availability and possibly price should prove advantageous.

And, as a practical matter, T-Mobile USA's HSPA+ network should perform credibly compared to the WiMAX and Long Term Evolution networks operated by Sprint, Clearwire, Verizon and AT&T. That should immediately raise questions for mobile marketers. So far, 4G promises "faster speeds." Most would agree that is the case.

The broader issue is whether end users value the "faster access" offers a big enough marketing platform to drive use of devices and applications using the "4G" networks, or whether other factors, including handset desirability, pricing and packaging, unique applications or other elements of service are equally, or more, important.

So far, a reasonable observer might say that 4G, in a network sense, has not changed end user experience all that much. There has been more differentiation in service plans, terms and conditions. Of late, device differentiation has been a bigger factor. But all that is fairly subtle stuff.

Most people would find it hard to give a concise, compelling reason for why a 4G experience is better than a 3G experience, with the exception of "speed." If a 3G network can match 4G speed, lots of people might turn their attention to handsets and packaging as the key drivers of choice.

T-Mobile USA criticizes rivals' high-speed plans | Reuters

U.S. Smartphone Penetration Now at 28%

Smartphone penetration in the United States reached 28 percent in the third quarter of 2010, according to The Nielsen Company.

The growing popularity of smartphones like Apple’s iPhone, RIM’s Blackberry devices and a variety of Google Android-based models on the market has accelerated the adoption rate.

Among those who acquired a new cellphone in the past six months, 41 percent opted for a smartphone over a standard feature phone, up from 35 percent last quarter.

Mobile Snapshot: Smartphones Now 28% of U.S. Cellphone Market | Nielsen Wire

Mobile Couponing: Glass Half Full or Half Empty?

According to some predictions in 2009, mobile couponing was ripe for takeoff. While relatively few mobile users had redeemed a coupon through their phone, many were interested, and Yankee Group predicted an increase in the number of mobile coupons redeemed in North America in 2010 from 200,000 to 2.3 million.

But some might argue consumers have been slow to respond. Others might say redemption rates and actions are well above what might be expected from other sorts of campaigns.

According to a September 2010 survey conducted by OnePoll for mobile transaction network mBlox, fewer than 15 percent of US mobile subscribers have redeemed a mobile coupon. This is about twice the penetration Yankee Group found in 2009.

So is that a glass half full, or half empty? An active response of 15 percent is considered quite good for other types of campaigns. Some would point out that a coupon redemption rates ranging from one percent to three percent would not be unusual for other types of traditional coupons.

That might strike you as quite low, but 81 percent of the units purchased using manufacturer coupons came from just 19 percent of U.S. households during the twenty-six week period ended June 27, 2009, for example, according to Nielsen.

The most avid users, called “coupon enthusiasts,” are households that purchased 104 or more items using manufacturers’ coupons. The 10 percent of shoppers that fall into this category accounted for 62 percent of manufacturers’ coupon units. They also accounted for 16 percent of total unit sales making them a very attractive and important consumer target.

Still Waiting on that Mobile Couponing Explosion - eMarketer

The Rise of the Gigabyte Phone

It might not seem obvious today, but we might soon be consuming nearly one gigabyte of data every month on our smartphones. That isn't much by wireline standards. But it is a pretty steep increase for smartphone users who have been consuming 200 megabytes a month or less.

Nor is it so much data compared to mobile broadband dongle usage, which might range about 2 Gbytes a month or so.

This is a similar growth pattern we saw on wired broadband networks; the faster the speeds, the more data we consumed.

The Rise of the Gigabyte Phone: Tech News

The Times U.K. Lost 4 Million Readers to Its Paywall

Whether a content provider decides to put up a "paywall" or not is a business decision any company can make. Whether that is a good thing or not remains to be seen.

According to comScore, the Times UK website saw its online readership decline by four million unique visitors a month worldwide to 2.4 million, or a 62 percent drop.

Pageviews fell off an even steeper cliff, plummeting 90 percent from an estimated 41 million in May, 2010 to four million in September, 2010.

People did what you’d expect them to do when faced with a paywall at a news site. They said, “No, thanks” and clicked away to another site.

That doesn't necessarily mean the decision is wrong. The Times might be willing to trade higher subscriber revenues for lower potential ad revenue. But it has been a wrenching decision so far.

The Times U.K. Lost 4 Million Readers to Its Paywall -- Seeking Alpha

Smartphone Data Will Grow 700% Over 5 Years

Smartphone users are generating two thirds of total mobile cellular traffic worldwide despite the fact that only 13 percent of mobile subscribers use smartphones, according to Informa Telecoms & Media.

And as these smartphone users spend more time on the Internet, the traffic that each one generates (Informa calls it "average traffic per user") will increase by 700 percent over the next five years.

Informa Telecoms & Media estimates that average traffic per smartphone currently averages 85 MBytes per month.

InformaTM :: Press Releases

Typical U.S. Mobile Ad Campaign is 2-3 Times Bigger than Similar European Campaigns

The United States is the second largest mobile advertising market in the world, behind Japan, Nick Lane, mobileSQUARED chief analyst says. In 2010, the US mobile advertising market will be worth $797.6 million, rising to $5.04 billion in 2015.

As with other forms of online advertising, most users exposed to ads do not actually "click" on mobile ads. (Click on image for a larger view of the data)

In and of itself, that is not a particular problem, as nearly all forms of advertising involve much "waste" (users are exposed who are not actually "prospects").

Because of the country’s vast population, the average mobile campaign spend is significantly larger than anything witnessed in Europe, for example. In the United States, the average mobile advertising campaign spend is between $75,000-100,000.

On average, creatives receive 10 percent to 15 percent of the budget which could total $15,000, for example.  In the UK for instance, the average creative budget would be approximately $5,000 maximum.

In the United States, this equates to a little under 8,000 mobile advertising campaigns, and an average of 21.8 new campaigns each day.

According to ZenithOptimedia, part of the Publicis Groupe, the US is set for a 2.4 percent increase in advertising spend to $151.5 billion in 2010, with global ad spend for 2010 expected to be worth $449.5 billion. For the U.S. advertising industry, mobile represents one percent of total spend.