440 Cities Might Drive Communications Growth by 2025

Anyone familiar with communications network economics also knows that the “easiest” places to build networks are dense urban areas, where the highest degree of resource sharing is possible.

So it is noteworthy that researchers at McKinsey & Company now predict that four billion people deemed “consumer class” will live in “developing” regions by 2025, up from around one billion in 1990.

According to McKinsey, the new members of the “consumer class” will have incomes high enough to classify them as significant consumers of goods and services, and around 600 million of them will live in 440 cities, largey in “emerging markets.”  

McKinsey suggests just 440 cities, only a few of which will be “megacities,” will account for “close to half of expected global GDP growth between 2010 and 2025.”

Likewise, 600 cities globally will generate nearly 65 percent of global economic growth by 2025.

But observers of the communications business also will know something else. As it will make sense for the largest, best capitalized firms to concentrate on the urban areas with high percentages of consumer class customers, that very concentration will leave some significant opportunities in rural and other areas where business cases are much more difficult.

So where regulators allow competition, and do not create barriers to innovation, smaller firms are sure to spring up to serve unmet needs.

Mobile Trends as Seen by TIA

The Telecommunications Industry Association’s “Mobile World Congress Primer” is a video about current mobile trends by John Jacobs TIA SVP. It looks, as you would guess, at device innovation, prospects for growth of mobile services, machine to machine services and estimates for revenue growth in various segments of the industry.

A video about the findings from the 2012 forecast will likely serve as a reasonable way of guessing what the 2013 forecast might reveal.

Access Recedes into the Background

To the extent that Google search term activity tells you anything important, one might argue that telecom, Internet, VoIP, 4G, mobile broadband are not “top of mind” these days. Instead, subjects such as WiFi, tablets, smart phones and apps are driving more search activity, and might therefore be said to be more “top of mind” than those earlier subjects.

Searches for the term “telecom" have steadily declined since about September 2004. Similarly, interest in VoIP, as judged by searches, peaked in 2005. Also, interest in “4G” peaked in June 2010. Searches for mobile broadband peaked in 2009.

Queries related to “Internet” also have declined about 25 percent since 2004.  

On the other hand, searches related to ‘smartphone” have risen since about March 2010. Searches based on “android” have grown steadily since about 2008.  

Searches related to apps also have grown since 2007. Likewise, interest in the term “WiFi" has steadily grown since 2004. Also, searches for tablet have risen since 2010.

Those changes probably are related to changes in the relationship between people, their devices and their networks. Applications and services are becoming user centric, or people centric, accessed on any number of devices and networks.

That might suggest that concerns about “access” mostly have receded, with current interest more focused on the apps and new devices.

17 Mobile Service Providers to Launch FireFox OS Smart Phones

The complicated smart phone ecosystem, which as participants constantly maneuvering for advantage within the ecosystem, will get a bit more complicated in 2013, as Mozilla releases its new Firefox smart phone operating system, and as European mobile service providers start selling devices using the new operating system. 

Mozilla says the Firefox OS will in initially be used by devices sold by 17 mobile service providers, interested in seeing an OS and device alternative to Apple and Google.

Those service providers include América Móvil, China Unicom, Deutsche Telekom, Etisalat, Hutchison Three Group, KDDI, KT, MegaFon, Qtel, SingTel, Smart, Sprint, Telecom Italia Group, Telefónica, Telenor, TMN and VimpelCom and Telstra.

Manufacturers of the phones so far include Alcatel, LG and ZTE, with Huawei joining later in 2013.

WebRTC Winners and Losers

Mozilla, AT&T and Ericsson are demonstrating a Web Real-Time Communication (WebRTC) proof of concept at Mobile World Congress 2013. The demonstration uses Ericsson's Web Communication Gateway, the Mozilla Social API and WebRTC support in Firefox, and the AT&T API Platform to enable the Mozilla Firefox browser to sync with a user's existing phone number and provide calling services without any plugins to download.

WebRTC is an open Web framework that is being standardized by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), and is intended to support communications functions such as voice,  video calls and text messaging using only a Web browser. It includes the fundamental building blocks for high quality communications on the web such as network, audio and video components used in voice and video chat applications.

And that probably provides all the information you might require to figure out why varous contestants might disagree about the value or role of WebRTC.

Among other things, WebRTC allows browser communication across browser brands.

As you might guess, observers disagree about the impact. As you might guess, there are ways WebRTC could develop that make it more useful for web developers than for telecom developers, which is another way of saying WebRTC could be more useful for web app providers than for communications providers.

One vision is that what gets created is “HTML5 with the ability to quickly add voice, video, chat and without the need for a browser plugin or extension,” notes Dan York. senior content strategist at the Internet Society.

The API originally was proposed proposed by Google, and is supported Mozilla and Opera, which might indicate some of the perspective on potential winners and losers.

Native video chat or video conferencing would likely be early applications for WebRTC, for example, since WebRTC would provide high quality, low delay, encrypted calls from one WebRTC browser to another, with no need for a plug-in. As you might guess, Microsoft has its own ideas about how to implement WebRTC, for that reason.

Gaming and social experiences are other areas where WebRTC could provide value.

There could be many winners and losers, ranging from equipment and technology suppliers to contestants in the advertising value chain. As often is the case with developing Web technologies, access providers benefit indirectly, or are potentially harmed.

PBX Market Dipped in 2012

"Following two years of modest growth, the PBX market had a tough 2012,” says Diane Myers, principal analyst for VoIP, UC, and IMS at Infonetics Research, part of a report to be released in early March 2013. It appears economic conditions played a role, as sales were depressed 10 percent in the Europe Middle East Africa region, which has been suffering from a recession.

Overall, the global PBX/KTS (private branch exchange and key telephone system) market represented $8.1 billion in 2012 sales, down four percent from 2011.

In 2012, the related unified communications segment grew eight percent, year-over-year, however. And IP PBX licenses (not including the value of hybrid licenses) grew 11 percent in 2012

North America and the Asia Pacific region saw net positive revenue gains in the PBX market in 2012, though, growing a modest two percent in North America and one percent in Asia Pacific, over 2011 levels.       

Cisco maintains its lead in global PBX/KTS revenue for the sixth consecutive quarter, while Avaya and Siemens also were in the top three suppliers for the year.

Just three suppliers in the enterprise telephony market posted year-over-year revenue gains in 2012: Cisco, Mitel, and ShoreTel.

Kenya-Based Safaricom Will Halt Feature Phones Sales to Focus on Smart Phones

Safaricom, the Kenyan mobile service provider, will soon phase out sales of feature phones to concentrate on selling smart phones.

“Safaricom is soon going to stop selling the cheap feature phones in all our retail outlets, as we try to skew the Kenyan market towards smartphones," said Nzioka Waita, Safaricom director.

The move shows increased confidence that cheaper smart phones will change end user demand preferences. 

On a larger level, the move provides one more illustration of how fast advanced mobile technology mobile technology has changed the communications landscape globally, in just a few short years. 

Consider that as recently as 2008, some estimates had fixed broadband connections outnumbering mobile broadband by about a four to one margin.

In 2012, the ratio was reversed, and there were four mobile broadband connections in use for every fixed connection. That sort of change--that fast--does not happen in the communications business very often.

The number of mobile broadband subscribers around the world surpassed that of fixed broadband at the end of 2010, in appears. So mobile broadband went from a 20 percent of market state to a 50 percent of market state in just two years, by some estimates.

After about another three years, mobile broadband grew to represent 80 percent of all broadband connections, by some measures. That is a breathtaking change, in terms of the speed of the change.

By 2015, it is anticipated that there will be 3.1 billion mobile broadband subscribers compared to 848 million fixed broadband subscribers. Safaricom seems ready to prove that forecast is accurate.