Can Mobile-Only Succeed? If So, Where and Why?

Can a “mobile-only” business strategy succeed when markets reach saturation? In other words, once every potential customer already buys the service, can some combination of higher usage, new products or vertical integration offset pricing and profit pressures in zero-sum markets where market share gains can only come at the expense of other mobile operators?

It is, at present, an open question. Optimists argue that mobile operators will grow revenue from new customers, new applications, new roles in the ecosystem and even cannibalization of fixed network market share.

Pessimists likely will argue that while this is a possibility for the best-capitalized and largest providers in some markets, in most markets opportunities to grow roles, value, revenues and revenue sources are quite limited.

Still, there are some examples of mobile-only financial performance beating the financial performance of converged suppliers who own both mobile and fixed assets. In the quite-mature European markets, for example, Rewheel analysts say mobile-only providers have outperformed converged suppliers.

source: Rewheel

Some caveats are in order. Generally speaking, mobile-only attackers have no legacy to protect, and the converged operators include both the former incumbent fixed operators and some attackers who have chosen to be in both mobile and fixed markets. The point is that attackers have more choices.

Also, there are structural issues. Fixed network suppliers have lost share in voice, while mobile operators have gained share. Mobile operators have been the exclusive providers of messaging. Now something similar is happening in the internet access market, as mobile alternatives are starting to compete with fixed networks.

When utilization of any network drops--when there are fewer paying customers--per-customer costs obviously grow. Conversely, on any network with higher utilization--more paying customers--such costs drop.

In other words, all other things being equal (they are not equal), any network that gets revenue from only a half of locations the network passes (for example), will have per-customer costs that are literally double the per-passing figures.

Selling more products to a smaller number of customers helps. That is why triple play bundles are so popular. Selling more products means revenue is higher, per account.

The point is that we need to be careful when analyzing strategies. There are multiple reasons why particular suppliers, in particular markets, might achieve higher or lower revenue, revenue growth, profitability and cost-per-customer metrics.

Lower-cost platforms, as a rule, will help, and mobile networks are lower cost than fixed networks. Fixed networks, on the other hand, have had strategic advantages where it comes to the types of products that can be sold. Video entertainment is bandwidth-intensive, so in markets where linear or on-demand video is popular, fixed networks have had a price advantage.

That also has been true for internet access charges. Where demand is heavy, fixed networks have a cost of supply advantage. Generally speaking, older mobile networks have featured costs per gigabyte as much as an order of magnitude higher than fixed networks. That explains the widespread use of offload to Wi-Fi.

source: Rewheel

For most fixed networks, the key problem is product substitution. In the past, voice revenues have driven financial results, and customers have fled for mobile alternatives. Fixed internet access and video services have helped compensate for voice losses.

The problem is that growth is tough when network utilization grows increasingly negative. That is why some have called the fixed networks business a matter of terminal decline.

At the same time, fixed network suppliers face not only mobile substitution, but also facilities-based new fixed network competitors in some markets. So revenue growth and profit now are bigger issues in some markets.  

In other words, fixed networks now are in the midst of a key business model change, where customers, products and roles are evolving. It is conceivable that capex and opex profiles have to adjust to lower potential revenues, no matter how customer sets and perceived value changes. Some argue that fixed network backhaul will drive more value in the 5G era.  

It might be tempting to argue that mobile-only business models still make more sense than integrated models combining ownership of both fixed and mobile assets. But many argue that converged business models actually have performed better, financially, than mobile-only operations, across much of Asia, for example.

The issue is the growing cost of supplying incremental bandwidth. To be sure, there are three basic positions on this matter. Some believe costs will grow unmanageably. Others believe costs can be managed to match demand. Yet others believe costs will drop.

The outcome likely will be different in various markets, and by firms within those markets. Low-cost or lower-cost providers will generally win, all other things being equal. Of course, all things rarely are truly equal.

App Providers Dominate Global "Brand Value" Rankings

With the caveat that evaluating the value of a brand hinges on valuation assumptions and methodology, as well as one’s estimation of the value of brands in a market where consumers arguably are less reliant on brands to drive purchasing decisions, the latest BrandZ study illustrates the strength of tier-one app provider brands and growth, while also highlighting the challenges facing telecom service providers as both industries arguably are becoming parts of one broader category.

The biggest takeaway is that although one telecom service provider appears in the top ten of “most valuable” global brands, the top six spots are all app providers. Significantly, app provider brand value is growing at rates from 23 percent to 92 percent, while AT&T, the lone telecom service provider to make the top ten, shrank seven percent over the last year.

Though Orange lead the telecom group with a 14-percent annual change in brand value, while NTT added 10 points, others suffered declines. Comcast Xfinity, Deutsche Telekom and Movistar brands actually gained a percent to four percent, all other telecom service providers on the list actually saw negative brand value change over the last year.

So while the technology segment grew value 23 percent last year, the telecom service provider segment grew only about two percent.

Assuming the researchers still are measuring what matters, the latest BrandZ report suggests that value in the internet ecosystem is shifting from access to applications, platforms and devices.

It is fair to say that change is happening, as well. While most marketers would likely argue that brand reputation does matter, recent studies suggest that perhaps half of Millennials, the most-important buying cohort, have no use for brands.

Others might argue that Millennials still have brand preferences, but that their criteria are different.   

Kantar MilwardBrown

Kantar MilwardBrown

source: BrandZ

source: BrandZ

source: BrandZ

source: BrandZ

source: BrandZ

Amazon is the most valuable retailer brand on the planet, according to BrandZ.  

Spectrum Supply and Demand are About to Go "Unstable"

It always is possible to get a robust debate about "whether enough spectrum is available." It might soon be possible to get a robust debate on whether spectrum prices will drop, based on increases in supply.

On one hand, demand keeps growing, so even if orders of magnitude new supply are added, supply and demand should remain in equilibrium, where prices are stable and supply matches demand, as economists like to say. 

On the other hand, many of you might look at your own experience in the communications business and not agree that the business is in equilibrium, and that applies to the value and price of acquired spectrum, as well as expectations about value and price as markets evolve. 

For example, though it is hard to place a financial value on mobile operator, business or consumer end user access to Wi-Fi, the ability to offload huge amounts of mobile phone internet access demand to Wi-Fi has a clear value to network operators who do not have to invest as much in capacity as they otherwise would have to do. 

In the U.S. mobile market, various participants also see multiple ways to increase the effective amount of capacity they can use. Buying new spectrum licenses is but one way to do so. In other cases a shift to small cells is seen as a reasonable alternative to acquiring new spectrum. That is basically Verizon's stated position.

In other cases, firms can buy companies that own licenses, as both Verizon and AT&T have done, and others might do. Dish Network has a trove of spectrum which must be put to commercial use or the licenses are lost. So many believe Dish ultimately will sell the licenses to a firm that can do so, fast. 

Mobile service provider mergers or acquisitions are another way to acquire additional spectrum.

But new techniques are coming, including the ability to aggregate unlicensed spectrum with licensed spectrum; access to shared spectrum that might cost less, or be accessible in unlicensed mode; plus huge increases in the amount of licensed and unlicensed spectrum available for mobile and other uses. 

So a good argument can be made that spectrum equilibrium is less likely. 

Recent spectrum auctions have diverged from expected sales values. In the past, mobile operators also have paid too much for spectrum.  

Recent U.S. spectrum auctions show mobile service providers being much more cautious about what they are willing to spend on buying spectrum licenses. The same trend was evident in recent spectrum auctions in India as well.  

In part, that is likely due to a perception that there are other ways of sourcing additional capacity, from aggregating unlicensed spectrum to use of smaller cells to shared spectrum or acquiring assets already awarded, but not yet in use. In some markets, spectrum trading also is a solution.  

But it also is possible that the perceived value of spectrum--still high--also has to match with expectations about the amount of revenue incremental spectrum can generate. If operators believe 100 new units will not drive the same amount of revenue as in the past, then their willingness to invest in spectrum will be less, on a per-unit basis.

Also, coming physical supply is disruptive, to say the least. All presently-licensed mobile spectrum, plus all Wi-Fi spectrum, plus new shared spectrum, amounts to about 2,600 MHz in the U.S. market. The actual mobile and Wi-Fi spectrum is closer to 800 MHz to 1,000 MHz.

But the Federal Communications Commission is releasing an order of magnitude more physical spectrum; much unlicensed; with possibly two orders of virtual capacity increases; plus spectrum sharing; plus small cells; plus better radios, is bound to be disruptive.

source: Deloitte

Supply and demand is at work, in other words. And if supply increases by

So how much will 5G change service provider spectrum valuation and asset models? Quite a lot. In fact, say consultants at Deloitte, “5G changes everything,” they say. That might be a bit of hyperbole, but the point is that there is greater uncertainty, for several reasons.

For starters, it is an underestimated fact that the value of spectrum licenses is part of the equity value of any public mobile service provider company.

source: Deloitte

Spectrum licenses account for “an average 35 percent of the assets of US WSPs (wireless service providers), and close to 20 percent of WSPs elsewhere, according to consultants at Deloitte.

But present valuations are assigned at original purchase value, and therefore might actually be different in an era of growing spectrum need and supply. At one level, the potential mismatch is easy to illustrate.

The value of assets for which an operator overpaid represents more value than similar assets for which an operator paid less, even if the assets acquired at lower cost might be equally, or more, valuable. So accounting “fiction” is at work.

Still, historically, rights to use mobile spectrum have been fundamental drivers of the ability to be in the business and earn revenue. But there are new questions in the 5G and coming eras, as the supply of spectrum (physical and virtual) is changing by orders of magnitude.

source: Deloitte

And how does one account for the value of being able to offload traffic to Wi-Fi? That avoided capital investment is worth something, but how much? And even if valuable, can it be reflected in an assessment of equity value?

Scarcity also matters. Historically, mobile spectrum has had value in two or more ways. It has been the necessary precondition for conducting business and satisfying demand. But it also has been a means of denying competitors access.

Licensed spectrum has been a driver of scarcity, and therefore equity value.

Deloitte argues the value of spectrum is presently undervalued. On the other hand, one might argue that so much new spectrum is coming, and the ways to use unlicensed spectrum also multiplying, that old rules of thumb about value and pricing do not work so predictably.

Cable operators, for example, clearly see lots of value in using their distributed public Wi-Fi nodes as infrastructure for their new mobile services. The “Wi-Fi first” access model does reduce either capex or wholesale capacity purchases or both.

And though the correlation is not linear, since mobile operators can increase capacity in other ways, the amount of spectrum a mobile operator can deploy is linked to the amount of revenue it earns. But each contestant has other assets to deploy (capital, brand, scale), so the relationship is not linear and causal.

In each market, some operators earn more revenue than others, for reasons including, but not limited to, the amount of spectrum they can deploy.

The point is that it is no clear whether spectrum presently is undervalued or not. The harder question is how to value such assets in the future, when the amount of supply--ignoring quality issues--is going to increase by an order of magnitude, and the effective capacity is going to increase by possibly two orders of magnitude.

Qualitative changes also will matter. Most internet of things apps will not require much bandwidth. And much bandwidth presently consumed across the backbone might in the future be cached and processed at the edge of the network. That will shift the bandwidth demand curve in significant ways.

On the other hand, if mobile networks are to challenge fixed networks as platforms for consumer internet access, then lots of cheap new bandwidth will be necessary, so mobile alternatives can offer comparable bandwidth and prices. Lower bandwidth costs are coming, in the mobile area, driven by platform improvements, more and more-efficient spectrum assets, use of small cells and shared, unlicensed and aggregated spectrum options.  

If mobile bandwidth traditionally has been an order of magnitude more expensive than fixed network bandwidth, then it is obvious that, to compete, mobile bandwidth has to be as capacious and affordable as fixed network bandwidth.

source: Mobile Experts

Up to this point, mobile cost per gigabyte has been as much as an order of magnitude more costly than fixed network cost per gigabyte. That is going to change.

No Demand for Gigabit?

Among the most-dangerous of statements is that something cannot be done, violates the laws of physics, costs too much, is too difficult to manage, or is not wanted by consumers or other users.

The reason such statements can be quite dangerous is that they are sometimes spectacularly wrong, in ways that dramatically affect whole indus

I can remember being at a meeting at the headquarters of the National Cable Television Association, in the earlier days of high definition television discussions, where it was proposed that a full HDTV signal could be squeezed from about 45 Mbps of raw bandwidth to the 6-MHz channelization used by the North American television industry.

The room essentially exploded, as the attendees, mostly vice presidents of engineering from the largest cable TV and broadcast firms, disagreed with the sheer physics of the proposal. Later, the executive who suggested HDTV in 6 MHz was indeed possible talked with his firm’s engineering vice president, about the the science, to reaffirm that such a thing actually could be done. “Are you sure about this?” was the question, given the magnitude of opposition.

To make a longer story short, it did prove feasible to compress a full HDTV signal into just 6 MHz of bandwidth, making for a much-easier financial transition to full HDTV broadcasting, as well as an ability for cable TV operators to support the new format.

Similarly, when the U.S. cable TV industry began to ask for analog optical transmission systems capable of carrying 20 channels of standard definition video without complicated channel-by-channel coding and decoding, a distinguished engineer from Bell Laboratories privately assured me that such a thing was in fact not possible, and that people who claimed it was possible were simply wrong.

To make a longer story short, it did indeed prove possible to take a full complement of analog video signals (40 channels, as it turned out), convert the full set of broadband signals to analog optical format, and deliver them over distances useful for cable TV purposes.

On another occasion, the vice president of one of the world’s biggest suppliers of equipment said privately that “digital subscriber line does not work” as a platform for high speed Internet access, even at relatively low speeds. Ultimately, that also proved incorrect. Over time, DSL performance was not only proven to be commercially viable, but also delivered much-faster speeds, over longer distances, as experience was gained.

The point is that when a smart, experienced, thoroughly-knowledgeable executive says that something “cannot be done,” one has to translate. What the statement means is only that, at a given point in time, before the application of effort and ingenuity, a given entity has not been able to do something.

That does not actually mean something literally “cannot be done.” Quite often, formerly impossible things actually are made possible, after dedicated investigation and development.

That applies to consumer demand for internet access, as well. It might well have been true two decades ago, or a decade ago, that there was no appreciable consumer demand for gigabit internet access, if such services could have been provided, and at retail prices those services would have cost, back then.

There was a time when the computing power (in constant dollar terms) of an Apple iPad 2, when Microsoft was founded in 1975, would have cost between US$100 million and $10 billion.

But when gigabit internet access is priced at a relatively modest premium to the standard offers (gigabit for $100, standard 200 Mbps for possibly $50 to $70), then there is much more demand.

“There is no demand for gigabit internet access” is a conditional statement. At some point, there will be lots of demand, on both mobile and fixed networks. All that has to happen is that price changes.

Comcast, for example, has increased the highest offered internet access speed at nearly Moore's Law rates. So the unstated qualifiers “at this price, at this time,” have to be kept in mind.

There will be a time, and a price, that has many, if not most, consumers buying gigabit rate internet access.

Global WANs Now Driven by Hyperscale Data Center Locations

Technology Predictions are Often Spectacularly Wrong

Nobel prize winner (in chemistry) and physicist Ernest Rutherford (known for his work on nuclear physics) once experimented with radio waves, but gave it up when told radio had no future.

The point is that even the best and brightest minds in technology often are very wrong about how a particular innovation will develop. So humility is not a bad attitude for any market researcher to adopt.

In 1943, Thomas Watson, IBM CEO said “I think there is a world market for maybe five computers.”

Ken Olson, Digital Equipment Corp. president, in 1977 said “there is no reason for any individual to have a computer in his home.”

Western Union execs once argued the telephone “is inherently of no value to us.”

Thomas Edison said “fooling around with alternating current is just a waste of time.”

Others argued the automobile was a novelty or fad. Studio executive Daryl Zanuck once said “television won’t be able to hold on to any market it captures after the first six months.”

Even Marty Cooper, a mobile phone pioneer, once argued that “cellular phones will absolutely not replace local wire systems.”

Robert Metcalfe, a father of Ethernet, said “the internet will soon go spectacularly supernova and in 1996 catastrophically collapse.

Steve Ballmer, Microsoft CEO, once said “there’s no chance that the iPhone is going to get any significant market share.”

The point is that the best and brightest among us, and certainly even competent market researchers, can be spectacularly wrong. That might be especially the case when subjects we do not routinely cover start to reshape industries, markets and possibilities, but such dangers always exist, even in markets we do claim to cover.

“You don’t know what you don’t know” is one explanation for forecasting error. No forecaster is able to incorporate somewhat unplanned events such as major recessions, huge changes in underlying core technologies, wars, revolutions and other exogenous events that directly affect markets of any sort.

Also, we tend to work with two-dimensional spreadsheets. Reality necessarily is more complex than that. So humility always is a good attitude to maintain when making predictions.

Why Software-Defined Networks are Destined to be More Important

There is a good reason why software-defined networks are getting more attention. Simply, all business and consumer networking use cases are becoming “cloud-based” interactions that are themselves largely virtualized.  

For enterprises and businesses, that tends to mean a shift towards virtual private networks supporting mobile, remote and distributed users who require access to cloud-based computing resources, no matter where they are working. That also implies a need for security and quality of service support provided by VPNs.

source: Cloudify

So a reasonable person might conclude that the shift in enterprise networking will be in the direction of software-defined networking (SD-WANs, VPNs, virtualized core networks, network slicing).