TABLE OF CONTENTS Over the last ten years the mobile cellular industry has moved from a niche voice service provider to a mass-market, multi-billion dollar industry. Good quality mobile voice services are now expected at an acceptable price, and international roaming, provided by the GSM mobile standards, is another must-have service.
With aggressive competition and mobile voice usage reaching saturation in many countries, mobile network operators and service providers have seen falling ARPU (average revenue per user) from standard voice services. Right across the mobile industry there is a need to increase revenues from non-voice services. The challenge is to provide appealing applications and services that will drive up usage, and therefore revenue, from data. The contribution of data to mobile operators revenues has grown steadily over the last two to three years. Many operators currently gain around 15% of their revenues from mobile data, and expect this to increase to 25% by the end of 2004. Some industry analysts such as Yankee Group believe that mobile data will contribute over 30% of revenue by 2007 [1]; the UMTS (Universal Mobile Telecommunications System) forum believes that 50% is achievable by 2006 [2].
Mobile network operators have already invested in the future and mobile data, both through upgrading their networks to offer packet data services over GPRS (general packet radio service), thus laying the foundations for 3G (third generation) mobile services, and also by the purchase of 3G licences for radio spectrum. 3G networks have been launched in the...
