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Report: There are now 1.6 billion 3G/4G connections in the world

Kevin Fitchard — Fri, 11 Jan 2013 16:14:58 +0000

Mobile broadband networks account for nearly one quarter of the world’s mobile cellular connections, according to numbers released this week by Wireless Intelligence, the research arm of the GSM Association. That winds up being 1.6 billion 3G and 4G subscriptions.

Wireless Intelligence defines mobile broadband as any CDMA EV-DO, HSPA, WiMAX or LTE technology, as well as the TD-SCDMA systems used in China – basically anything that can stream a video to a smartphone with a decent connection. In total 580 operators in 186 countries are running those networks.

The regional breakdown of where those subscribers are is particularly interesting. As you might expect, Asia leads the pack by leagues, supporting 773 million mobile broadband connections. The Americas (both continents) are second with 426 million links, while Europe boasts 358 million connections.

But Asia also has the most room for growth. While in Europe and the Americas mobile broadband connections account for 50 percent of all links, in Asia the number is at a mere 18 percent. For that reason, Wireless Intelligence is projecting Asia’s growth rate will be the fastest, increasing its 3G and 4G subscription base by 50 percent each year.

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Study: In 5 years, 4.4% of all ads (not just digital) will appear on a phone screen

Kevin Fitchard — Thu, 20 Dec 2012 17:03:05 +0000

Mobile ads may be a tough market to crack today, but the analysts at Berg Insight believe it will get sorted out — and in a big way. It estimates that in 2017 4.4 percent of the total global ad spend across all media will be targeted at the phone screen.

We’re not just talking about digital advertising — Berg estimates mobile will be 15.5 percent of the total online ad spend. Rather, we’re talking 4.4 percent of all ads, whether they’re shown on TV, staring at you from a billboard or embedded in a website. What’s more, Berg said it was careful how it quantified “mobile.” Ads you view on tablets or other optimized browsing devices don’t count. This would be strictly adverting and marketing that appears on the mobile phone.

In real numbers, Berg estimated that mobile ads and marketing comprised a €3.8 billion (U.S. $5 billion) market in 2011, dominated by Google’s AdMob and Apple’s iAd platforms. But Berg is predicting that number will grow by a factor of five into a €19.7 billion market in 2017.

“Consumers are currently devoting a quarter of their media consumption time on mobile devices, yet the channel only attracts slightly more than 1 percent of the ad dollars,” Berg Insight Telecom Analyst Rickard Andersson said in a statement.

Of course, five years is a long ways out, and the track record on such long-term prognostication is mixed. But if Berg is right, that’s only good news to a company like Facebook which has found of its traffic and customers moving to mobile platforms but only recently began advertising on the phone.

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The average US subscriber owns 1.57 mobile devices

Kevin Fitchard — Mon, 22 Oct 2012 21:34:14 +0000

How many mobile devices do you own? According to Wireless Intelligence, the research arm of the GSM Association, the number is 1.57 if you’re an average American subscriber. It’s even higher in the rest of the world, coming out to 1.85 mobile connections per subscriber.

If those numbers seem kind of high, it’s because Wireless Intelligence has done a bit more digging into the numbers. Instead of merely dividing the total number of mobile connections by a country’s population, it’s focusing exclusively on mobile device users – infants, Luddites and other non-phone owners don’t factor into the final figures. In addition, WI is eliminating the machine-to-machine (M2M) communications from its count. So what’s left are 225 million unique U.S. subscribers (71 percent of a the U.S. population) that own a combined 354 million mobile devices.

A lot of the 1.57 can be chalked up to people owning separate phones for work and personal use, but according to WI Senior Analyst Joss Gillet, connected tablets and laptops, and 4G modems are starting to make big contributions as well. New shared data plans from AT&T and Verizon will only spur multiple-device adoption.

Globally, overall penetration levels are lower – only 45 percent of the world population owns a mobile device – but on average those customers tend to have more than one connection. This can be explained in part by the growing popularity of dual-SIM card devices in developing markets.

Photo courtesy of Shutterstock user Stanislav Komogorov

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Telefónica, Telenor go after developers in tandem

Kevin Fitchard — Wed, 10 Oct 2012 20:04:21 +0000

There’s little hope for a common set of network application programming interfaces (APIs) that work across all mobile carriers – as the failure of the Wholesale Application Community so aptly demonstrates. But there may be a chance that individual carriers can glom together to form smaller developer ecosystems.

An example emerged this week in a partnership between two of the largest carrier groups in the world: Telefónica and Telenor. Telenor is shoehorning its own network APIs into Telefónica’s BlueVia developer program, which presents developers with a potential audience of nearly 400 million customers.

The two operators aren’t creating a new operating system or runtime environment. Instead they’re starting out small, exposing a mobile billing API that works the same way across all of their dozens of individual carrier properties around the world. That means developers can design smartphone, feature phone and even mobile web apps, but they can all tap into a single unified interface for charging in-app purchases to the customer’s bill.

It doesn’t solve the problem of developers building once and deploying all over the world, but 400 million customers is nothing to scoff at. We’ve seen other operator collaborations in Europe though not to this scale. The three largest French carriers have formed a program called YouConnect using Alcatel-Lucent technology that allows them to expose a single unified API for subscriber data to m-commerce app developers.

Like the French operators, Telefónica is bringing outside help to cement these disparate APIs together. Last year, it signed a deal with mobile payments provider Boku to handle the back-end integration across its different properties. That probably explains why carrier billing is the first API to have a big impact for BlueVia, with Google, Facebook, Microsoft and RIM already tapping into it.

Telefónica said it would expose more BlueVia APIs shortly, though it didn’t identify which ones. In addition, Telefónica extended an open invitation to carriers around the world to join it in Telenor in building its common API platform. It’s still far too early to tell, but maybe Telefónica can accomplish what the WAC couldn’t.

Photo courtesy of Flickr user John Picken

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Meet the world’s top 20 mobile carriers: Asia on the rise

Kevin Fitchard — Thu, 04 Oct 2012 15:44:59 +0000

Wireless Intelligence has compiled its annual ranking of global carriers by number of mobile connections, and not much has changed from last year’s list. China Mobile still dominates the list with nearly 700 million subscribers, and the composition of the remaining 19 is roughly the same, according to the analysis arm of the GSM Association. If there is an underlying trend visible, though, it’s that Asian operators are gradually displacing normally dominant Western operators.

Vodafone and Latin America’s America Móvil kept second and third rankings, but India’s Bharti Airtel replaced Telefónica at No. 4, and it’s within spitting distanced of breaking into the top 3. Asian operators China Unicom, China Telecom, Indonesia’s Telkomsel and India’s Idea Cellular all rose in the rankings. Meanwhile, Verizon Wireless, AT&T, T-Mobile-owner Deutsche Telekom, and Russia’s VimpelCom and Sistema groups all fell in the chart.

Every single one of these carriers saw its customer base grow, but in general Asian operators saw much faster growth. That makes sense since many Asian countries are still far from reaching the mobile saturation levels of the west.

The big exception was France Telecom, which fell off the list completely last year but returned in the No. 12 slot. Though on paper FT’s total global subscribers by 57 percent, that performance has more to do with Wireless Intelligence’s methodology than any spectacular performance by FT’s Orange properties. WI only counts connections if a carrier group owns a majority stake in an operator (for instance Verizon’s subscribers don’t count toward Vodafone’s total). FT recently upped its ownership in several operators over 50 percent, which accounts for the huge subscriber boost.

It’s also important to note that connections don’t always translates into revenues. Verizon and AT&T rank 16^th and 18^th in total connections respectively, but they’re Nos. 2 and 3 in total revenues. In terms of revenues, Verizon is larger than its parent Vodafone, even though Vodafone has more than three times as many customers. As Wireless Intelligence points out, North American operators have a particular knack for making more money on each connection.

Photo courtesy of Shutterstock user Kittisak

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Battered by the global LTE war, Alcatel-Lucent will cut 5000 jobs

Kevin Fitchard — Thu, 26 Jul 2012 19:27:06 +0000

The global race against its old enemies Ericsson, Nokia Siemens Networks and new rival Huawei, is taking its toll on Alcatel-Lucent. The Franco-American vendor revealed on its second quarter earnings call that it would cut 5000 jobs by the end of 2013 in a new retrenchment effort.

The cuts aren’t as severe as the 17,000 layoffs Nokia Siemens announced in December, but they represent 7 percent of Alcatel-Lucent’s total employee base. At the company’s earnings call on Thursday, CEO Ben Verwaayen didn’t name specific divisions or regions targeted for pink slips, but he said the cuts would be across the company, including in its home country of France.

Alcatel-Lucent makes both wireline and wireless gear, but it has struggled in particular to make the transition from older 3G mobile technologies to new 4G networks. Alcatel-Lucent has always been dominant in CDMA, but investment in older 2G and 3G technologies has dwindled as carriers look to LTE. While Alcatel-Lucent bridged that generational gap in the U.S. quite easily – landing major pieces of Verizon, AT&T and Sprints’ LTE contracts – it has seen much less success in international markets, ceding market share to its three main rivals.

North America accounts for 39 percent of Alcatel-Lucent’s sales, and those sales were down 8.3 percent in the second quarter to €1.4 billion (U.S. $1.7 billion), contributing to its €254 million loss.

According to a recent ABI Research study, Nokia Siemens is the now world’s leading LTE vendor in terms of new contracts and intellectual property. Ericsson and Huawei, which are battling for the title of largest overall telecom vendor, ranked second and third respectively. Alcatel-Lucent came in fourth in an LTE market that many believe can only support two or three primary equipment makers.

Verwaayen, however, did identify one source of revenue the vendor plans to tap. He said Alcatel-Lucent would create a separate business division to manage its 44,000 patents, which could have substantial value. Alcatel-Lucent still owns Bell Labs, the industrial research giant created by the old AT&T monopoly and the wellspring of many of the world’s most important tech inventions. Bell Labs is a shadow of its former self, having seen its once mammoth applied research budget slashed, but it developed many of the key innovations that went into today’s optical and wireless networks.

Image courtesy of matthi / Shutterstock.com

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Global LTE connections reach 27M, almost all in U.S., Korea and Japan

Kevin Fitchard — Thu, 26 Jul 2012 18:39:44 +0000

LTE’s impact globally is still small, but it’s growing particularly fast in the countries where carriers were quick to leave the 4G gate. According to a new Wireless Intelligence report, there were 27 million LTE connections in the world at the end of June, but 87 percent of them were in the U.S., South Korea and Japan.

The U.S. has 12.7 million LTE connections, and that is nearly half of the global total. Though three major operators and several smaller ones have live LTE networks, Verizon Wireless still accounts for the vast majority of the business, boasting more than 10 million subscribers. Verizon was the first major operator to bring its LTE network online in December of 2010, and still has a much broader footprint than AT&T and Sprint, which just launched earlier this month.

Japan’s NTT DoCoMo has also been reaping the benefits of its 2010 launch. It hit the 4 million LTE connection mark this month, accounting for nearly all of Japan’s 4G subscribers. Competitors Softbank Mobile and eMobile only activated their networks this year.

The race in Korea is much closer: SK Telecom hosts 4 million LTE links, while LG’s Uplus has 3 million and Korea Telecom has 1.4 million.

In just six months global LTE connections have increased 170 percent from 10 million at the end of 2011. As more LTE networks come online that pace will only increase.

LTE image courtesy of Shutterstock user Inq

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Mapping the global trade routes of mobile apps

Kevin Fitchard — Tue, 03 Jul 2012 15:53:23 +0000

Mobile apps may not be shipped on galleons or via air freight, but they are definitely crossing oceans. According to data from VisionMobile’s recent developer survey, a big market around the import and export of apps has emerged globally, and as is the case in manufacturing that trade is lopsided with developing markets shipping their apps to North American and European shores.

Both European and North American European developers tend to be very insular, with nearly three-quarters surveyed saying the highest demand for their apps remains in region. What global trade the old world and new do enjoy tends to be with one another. Forty percent of European developers said North America is their top export region, while 22 percent of North American devs named Europe as their top export market, VisionMobile found.

In other regions, though, developers appear to be targeting their wares at foreign app stores. About four out every ten developers in Asia and Latin America are building apps for export, while in Africa and Oceania the numbers are even higher. Their trade patterns all differ though. According to VisionMobile, Latin America and Oceania are exporting most of their apps to North America. Africa and Asia balance their exports between Europe and North America, but Africa favors the former while Asia favors the latter.

Vision’s very detailed Developer Economics report covers many other areas of the developer market. Last month, we wrote about its conclusions on developer platform choices and revenues, which found that BlackBerry developers typically rake in more revenue than iOS and Android devs.

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It’s a big, big world of MVNOs: 812 and counting

Kevin Fitchard — Sat, 02 Jun 2012 21:00:34 +0000

There seem to be an awful lot of new mobile virtual network operators (MVNOs) popping up lately, from Republic Wireless and Voyager Mobile to FreedomPop and Ting. MVNOs — network-less operators that resell another carrier’s voice and data services – practically went extinct in the last decade, but in the last few years they have enjoyed a big resurgence. According to Wireless Intelligence, there are now 812 MVNOs throughout the world, and they only seem to be multiplying.

The biggest concentration is in Europe, which hosts 526, or about 65 percent, of the global total. That makes sense when you consider Europe’s huge number of operators: the region’s dozens of countries each have multiple operators, each of which, in turn, has multiple virtual operator partners. Considering North America, which Wireless Intelligence defines as the U.S. and Canada, includes only two countries, it still has an impressive number of MVNOs: 73.

That number doesn’t include the operator sub-brands the Tier I carriers own, for instance Sprint’s Boost Mobile, Virgin Mobile USA and Assurance Wireless. According to Wireless Intelligence there are 17 sub-brands in the U.S. and Canada and 224 globally.

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Apple Store set to open right in RIM’s backyard

Darrell Etherington — Tue, 09 Aug 2011 15:46:16 +0000

Apple is preparing to open five new retail stores internationally on Saturday, including one smack dab in the middle of competitor Research In Motion’s home territory of Waterloo, Ontario. Apple continues to grow its physical retail presence, which it has cited as a major contributor to the success of devices like the iPad.

The new Waterloo location (at the Conestoga Mall) seems significant, considering that the city’s biggest claim to fame is being the home of RIM, maker of the BlackBerry smartphones and software. Apple’s other stores in Canada to date have generally been located either in major urban centers, or in communities bordering such metropolitan areas. Waterloo, a university town with a reputation for being Canada’s Silicon Valley, thanks in large part to RIM’s presence there, still only has a population of 98,000, swelling to around 120,000 during the post-secondary school year. Apple’s first Canadian store to venture outside of the major cities and their suburbs certainly comes with a provocative address.

Apple’s other new stores opening this Saturday include two in the U.S., and two abroad. Here’s the rest of list:

Fashion Place, Murray, Utah
Anchorage 5th Avenue Mall, Anchorage, Alaska
Southland, Cheltenham, Victoria, Australia
I Gigli, Florence, Italy

Apple’s planned retail expansion in 2011 includes a lot of international growth, and this crop of openings definitely reflects that. Any readers planning to pay a visit to any of these locations during their inaugural weekends?

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