This fairly pessimistic report on the future of mobile operators makes the point that data services may not be the telco’s white knight after all, since “we will see downward pressure on data pricing and a move, if not next year, then in 2006, to flat-rate pricing”. He points out that even SMS is overpriced in most countries compared to Japan and South Korea, which is true – on a per bit basis SMS is the most expensive thing on mobile phones. The take-up of 3G is also portrayed as slow, at least outside of Japan and Korea, which is a little unfair. Broadband connections took a long time to take off, but over the past few months we’ve seen them suddenly surpass dial-up connections in many markets. Even if they do take off, though, there is more grim news.
“But will new mobile services mean new revenues for the mobile operator or for a third party? There will be growing evidence in 2005 of a willingness for content providers to bypass the operator, and users downloading content to a PC and then to their mobile device.”
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