NTT DoCoMo, China Mobile, and Korea Telecom agreed a joint Wi-Fi inbound roaming scheme covering Japan, China and Korea as well as standardized NFC handset and service requirements. The three companies will jointly show their ideas to global operators at the Mobile World Congress 2013 in Barcelona this week. This is kind of collaboration Telcos must look forward to.
One can expect NFC and mobile payments as areas of large potential for the carriers [Thus Airtel Money is increasingly focused on widening its market base, though with USSD Interface for the time being until every Indian has a SmartPhone], and I believe offloading is increasingly necessary to keep up with mobile data demands. Networking giant, Cisco says “globally, 33 percent of total mobile data traffic was offloaded onto the fixed network through Wi-Fi or femtocell in 2012”. They expect this will increase to 46% by 2017 and note that “without offload, mobile data traffic would have grown 96 percent rather than 70 percent in 2012” and the next five years would see a 74% instead of a 66% CAGR. No doubt Airtel is quietly building a Massive Wi-Fi Network [HotSpot] in Densely Populated Areas of cities.
If you look at others, China Mobile offloads over two-thirds of its data traffic to WLAN, and SoftBank says ideally 100% of traffic from inside homes and offices will be switched via Wi-Fi onto landlines in the future. Operators’ ability to drive revenue growth from data will also depend on their ability to charge for data services, whether using Wi-Fi or not. Experiences to date have been mixed with some positive signs in Japan and Korea but more concerning ones in China, where voice and SMS are being cannibalized by data with data pricing being affordable so far.
The Following slide shows the Mobile data traffic growth by device.
