Despite falling average ARPUs, the mobile content and services market will continue to grow dramatically as services and applications reach maturity and new services begin to gain traction. Informa Telecoms & Media has come up with the right conclusion to please the operators – no need to worry about earning less money per customer, there will always be booming data revenues to compensate.
Informa anticipates that by 2011 just under half of all mobile subscribers worldwide will use mobile browsing, a trend it sees starting with operator offerings such as T-Mobile’s Web n Walk and 3’s X-Series.
Despite this, overall revenues for the non-voice market will continue to be dominated by messaging SMS will still be generating over half the total revenue in 2011.
“We may not be buying as many games, full-track downloads or multimedia messages as operators would like, but we are spending a huge amount of time sending and reading text messages and organising our lives using the phone’s address book, clock, alarm and calendar functions,” commented Daniel Winterbottom, senior analyst with Informa and author of the new report.
“Over time, users will warm to other data services as well. The mobile web is a prime example: WAP failed to take off when it was first launched, but five years on, more and more users have become comfortable with accessing news or other information on their mobile phones.”
The mobile entertainment space will also see significant innovation and development. Several technologies, such as mobile music, have been available for a number of years but the increased availability of high-speed data networks (such as 3G and HSDPA) is giving further appeal to these services.
Despite this, overall revenues for the non-voice market will continue to be dominated by messaging SMS will still be generating over half the total revenue in 2011.
“We may not be buying as many games, full-track downloads or multimedia messages as operators would like, but we are spending a huge amount of time sending and reading text messages and organising our lives using the phone’s address book, clock, alarm and calendar functions,” commented Daniel Winterbottom, senior analyst with Informa and author of the new report.
“Over time, users will warm to other data services as well. The mobile web is a prime example: WAP failed to take off when it was first launched, but five years on, more and more users have become comfortable with accessing news or other information on their mobile phones.”
The mobile entertainment space will also see significant innovation and development. Several technologies, such as mobile music, have been available for a number of years but the increased availability of high-speed data networks (such as 3G and HSDPA) is giving further appeal to these services.