European Mobile Roaming Prices Drop July 1, 2012

Mobile data charges will be price capped starting July 1, 2012, with the limit set at no more than €0.70 a megabyte. That will represent a decline of about 75 percent, at least for European Union residents using their devices in other EU member countries.

The EU rule does not affect the prices providers can charge for data roaming outside the European Union. It isn't yet clear how much service provider revenue will be reduced. 

The EU market for mobile roaming services can be divided into voice services, SMS and

In 2009, the retail EU roaming market accounted for 4,777 billion EUR in revenues, a study noted. 

Some 71 percent of that was voice roaming charges, 17 percent for data and around 11 percent for SMS. 

The total wholesale market size in 2009 amounted to 1,253 billion EUR.

Roaming revenues appear to represent around 3.68 percent of the total EU mobile market. Between
2007 and 2009, revenues for voice roaming fell quite significantly as a result of both lower
prices as well as lower volumes of traffic (-3,2%). 


For SMS roaming, the impact of the regulation was seen in lower service provider revenues in 2009 compared to 2008.


For data services, the increase in volume of 43,6 percent between 2008 and 2009 combined with the imposed decrease in wholesale prices led to an overall decrease in revenues, the study says. At the retail level, however, where no price ceilings were imposed for data roaming, the total revenues in 2009 remained at the same level as in 2008.




The new European Union law means that prices for making a call abroad will be lowered to 29 cents per minute, while it will cost eight cents to receive a call, nine cents to send a text and 70 cents per MByte  of download data used. This is a saving of 75 per cent compared to roaming costs in 2007. 
Vodafone "Euro Traveller"  allows U.K. customers to pay no more for calls, messages and data when they're on the continent as they do at home, after an opt-in payment of £3 a day.

The Everything Everywhere brand will offer customers the opportunity to buy "Travel Boosters" when they use their smartphones or 3G modems overseas.

Smartphone owners can pick 3, 10 or 50MB bundle for £1, £2.50 and £10, respectively - or 33p, 25p or 20p a megabyte. Each bundle lasts for 30 days or until the data has been used, whichever comes first.

For modem owners, the price bands are 3, 20, 50 and 200MB, priced at £1, £5, £10 and £35, respectively. Again, that's 33p, 25p, 20p and 17.5p a megabyte.

Google Now Launches

Real-time and personalized information, essentially streamed automatically, is the value.

MasterCard and Deutsche Telekom to Launch Payments

MasterCard Worldwide and Germany-based Deutsche Telekom group have signed a partnership agreement that will help the telco launch a prepaid PayPass application for its planned NFC mobile wallet.

The deal likely will be similar to a mobile-payments partnership announced by U.K.-based Vodafone Group and Visa, which uses a prepaid mechanism to load cash onto a user mobile device.

7-Eleven Stores to Sell PayPal Prepaid Cards

The PayPal Prepaid MasterCard card will be available at roughly 5,500 7-Eleven 7-Eleven stores nationwide once its rollout is completed this year.

Customers will be able to reload cash onto their cards at these locations, prepaid card marketer NetSpend Holdings says.

Here's the tie to mobile payments and banking. As with the M-Pesa service, retail agents are often the places users load cash and receive cash, even if the mobile device supplies the messaging function. Also, the way cash will be loaded onto many mobile payment accounts is by linking to an offline prepaid account of some kind, as with the Starbucks mobile app.

Research in Motion Has 3.6% U.S. Device Share, Down from 41%

For Research in Motion, it has been a tough four years, as U.S. device market share dropped from 41 percent to 3.6 percent.

A Third of Kenya's GDP Now Passes Through M-Pesa

If you were to nominate one mobile money service, today, as the most-successful on the planet, it would hard to propose any company but M-Pesa. By some accounts, about a third of Kenya’ gross domestic product passes through M-PESA and Safaricom earns more money from M-PESA than it does from text messaging, in part because SMS tends to be bundled, free of charge, in the payments system.

In August 2011, the Wall Street Journal reported Vodafone earned $21 million through its Kenyan subsidiary, with $15.6 million coming from M-Pesa in license fees. As of November 2011 M-Pesa had over 14 million subscribers (out of a population of about 40.5 million, according to the World Bank) and more than 28,000 agents across the country versus around 600 ATMs

M-Pesa is operator-centric, working through a SIM toolkit application that sits on all Safaricom SIM cards.

To put money on your phone, you walk into an authorized agent, hand over your money, then receive an SMS saying that the money has arrived on your phone. To send money to someone, you go to the pay menu on the phone, look for the person in your phonebook, or add their details, then send them the amount. They get a message saying, in effect, “If you have an M-PESA account, you now have 50 shillings [say] on your phone. If you are not an M-PESA account holder, go to any agent and they will give you the money.”

Mobile TV is a Feature, not a Product, Yet

At the moment, services such as "TV Everywhere" that allow users to view some of the video they purchased as part of their subscription video services on a smart phone or tablet remain a "feature," and are not yet envisioned as revenue-generating "products."

That would not be an unusual pattern. Service provider Wi-Fi hotspot access has become a feature of a broadband subscription, whether provided by a fixed or mobile network. That seems to be the developing pattern for mobile TV services tied to another subscription.

Smartphone or tablet apps that are tied in to a cable TV show are definitely about "discovery and engagement," not advertising revenue, said Tammy Franklin, Scripps Networks Interactive senior vice president of affiliate sales and new media distribution.

For Verizon Wireless customers, unlimited U.S. domestic voice and texting essentially now are features of a mobile service, not discrete products. The basic connection fee includes both voice and texting.