European Parliament Says:Stop the ITU taking over the Internet"

Control of the Internet must be stopped from falling into the hands of the International Telecommunication Union (ITU), the European Parliament has warned.

The resolution calls on the E.U. member states to prevent any changes to the International Telecommunication Regulations that would be harmful to the openness of the Internet, net neutrality and freedom of expression.

European Mobile Industry is Contracting

Globally, telecom revenue is growing. But not in Western Europe, it appears. The mobile industry’s combined revenues from voice, messaging and data services in the EU5 economies (United Kingdom, France, Germany, Spain and Italy) will drop by nearly 20 billion Euros, or four percent a year, in the next five years, and by 30 billion Euros by 2020, according to STL Partners. 

The obvious implication is that mobile service providers in the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Spain and Italy will have to create new revenue streams worth 30 billion Euros, just to stay where they are, by 2020. 

That is roughly in line with a rule of thumb I use that suggests service providers in just about every developed market will need to replace about 50 percent of current revenue in 10 years. 

Mobile Operator VoIP Revenues Remain Paltry

For mobile service providers, the fundamental problems with over the top voice and messaging services have to do with the business model, for obvious reasons. 

Since mobile service providers do not own the over the top apps, they do not participate in the revenue. But if they try and offer their own OTT apps, priced competitively with the over the top providers, they make little money, and potentially disrupt their own more-lucrative voice and messaging services. 

In fact, mobile VoIP is still worth less than 0.5 percent of overall mobile voice revenues, according to ARCchart.

ARCchart sees similar issues for mobile service provider messaging. ARCchart expects that instant messages will exceed text messaging volumes by 2014 and continue growing rapidly, accounting for 65 percent of all message traffic pushed over mobile networks by 2016. 

As with voice, OTT messaging will cannibalize mobile operator services. In 2012, global mobile VoIP service revenues might be about $2.5 billion. But mobile voice revenue overall could be in the range of roughly $1 trillion. 

Mobile Roaming Revenues to exceed $80 Billion by 2017

Mobile roaming, with growth powered especially by use of data services out of region, will grow to more than $80 billion by 2017, compared to $46 billion in 2012. 

Mobile data will provide most of the growth, if not the absolute greatest volume of revenue, generating about $35 billion in revenue by 2017, when data roaming revenues will represent about eight percent of total mobile service provider revenues, says Juniper Research. 

Still, that means voice roaming will account for $45 billion in 2017. Western Europe will continue to be the region where roaming revenue is the most significant revenue contributor. 

Lower roaming fees, often mandated by regulators, actually will help. As any economist might say, lowering the price of any product tends to increase consumption of those products. 

Children Want Their Gadgets

Approximately half of children six to 12 surveyed by Nielsen say they want a full-sized iPad  and 36 percent want an iPad Mini. 

The iPod Touch and iPhone are also coveted devices among these young consumers (36% and 33%, respectively).  

Kids are also likely to ask for dedicated gaming hardware for the Christmas and holiday season, with 39 percent wanting Nintendo’s Wii U. 

About 29 percent say they want a portable DS. About a quarter say they want  Microsoft’s Xbox 360 and a similar percentage want a Sony PlayStation 3.

Among consumers aged 13 and older, tablets and full-sized computers were the top electronics choices, with roughly one in five indicating they want to acquire the iPad, another tablet brand or a computer. 

NTT cuts FTTH Prices: LTE Competition to Blame

Japan's NTT is finding consumers are shifting demand from fixed networks to Long Term Evolution mobile networks, which is a real world test of whether LTE 4G networks really can compete with fixed network high speed Internet access.  

As  a result, NTT has cut fixed network broadband access prices by 34 percent, from JPY5,460 (USD67) to JPY3,600, TeleGeography says. 

So there is now serious evidence that Long Term Evolution is viewed as a suitable replacement for fixed network service, with the greatest danger emerging where you would expect, with younger users. .

NTT East and NTT West’s "fiber to the home" subscriber growth has significantly slowed down.

National FTTH household penetration was about 46 percent in the second quarter of 2012.

Net subscriber additions for the year ending June 2012 falling to 1.2 million, down from 1.7 million in the year to end-June 2011 and from two million in the year to June 2010.

Executives at NTT East and NTT West say the biggest, single reason for the slowdown in FTTH subscriber growth is the fact that many young subscribers now prefer to have their own personal LTE-based high speed broadband service, rather than paying for a FTTH service. 

That also seems especially true when those customers have to pay for a mobile broadband connection anyhow. Some might question the long-term viability of that approach, if users start to watch lots of longer form streaming video. 

As usual, consumers are rational. Users in Japan who have abandoned fiber to the home seem to be watching short form video, but avoiding streaming or downloading long form video that would put pressure on their mobile data plans. 

Once again, we see that consumers are smart, and will alter their behavior and spending plans to gain the optimal value from the range of services available to them, deliberately choosing not to watch long form streaming video if it means saving money. 

Although there were only nine million LTE subscribers worldwide in late 2011 compared to 220 million FTTx subscribers (88 million for FTTH/B and VDSL alone), momentum is rapidly growing in favor of mobile, according to IDATE. 

In 2016, IDATE predicts that the number of LTE subscribers will exceed 900 million, compared to nearly 230 million for fixed ultrafast-broadband (FTTH/B and VDSL).

3 Small Cells for Every Macrocell?

By 2017, Ericsson expects each macro base station in urban areas will be supplemented by about three small cells. 

Today, there are about five million macro base stations deployed worldwide and those in metro areas account for about 15 percent of the total, or about 750,000. That suggests a total of perhaps 2.25 million small cells. 

It always is difficult to predict the deployment of small cells because that category sometimes includes virtually all cell sites smaller than a macrocell, including potentially large numbers of consumer grade units used inside homes or offices, plus larger small cells deployed as part of the public mobile network.