|
Mobile & Wireless
Mobile Broadband value added services
Industry can learn from Asia-Pac’s lead
by Jean-Pierre Bienaimé
 In Western Europe where I’m sitting right now, we can’t help but follow
the light-speed progress of 3G in Asia with rapt fascination.
With Japanese 3G/UMTS family penetration (WCDMA + HSPA) already
standing at over 60% (source: Wireless Intelligence), any lingering
perceptions of mobile broadband as a niche proposition quickly
evaporate. The Korean picture is equally dynamic. SKT and KTF are
posting dramatic growth in WCDMA connections as customers migrate
swiftly from EV-DO. Korea’s handset vendors also have much to be
pleased about, both at home and in global markets where there’s a
constant flow of new devices. Many of these are premium models loaded
with extras to take full advantage of HSPA’s exciting service capabilities.
Networks and terminals, of course, mean little to an operator’s bottom
line without lucrative services. Here, as we often note in Europe, Asia
has long been the proving ground for friendly, compellingly-priced
services that mobile customers actually want to use. Indeed, in
advanced markets like Korea, the lion’s share of Asian non-voice
revenues now comes from music, games and video.
Not that 3G isn’t already a flourishing success elsewhere in the world.
Bolstered by compelling tariffs and a dazzling choice of attractively
priced terminals, there are almost a third of a billion customers of
WCDMA networks. Of these, more than 50 million are enjoying peak data
rates of up to 7.2 Mbps thanks to HSPA – the next step on the road to
true mobile broadband. In Western Europe at least, HSPA’s success has
been heavily dongle-driven: the ubiquitous presence of USB devices
backed by generous flat-rate access bundles present a compelling
alternative to fixed ISP offerings. Learning much from Asia’s lead,
European operators are also seeing revenues strengthen from value-
added service offerings that range from music and video to web portals
and social networks.
In Asia and elsewhere, it’s clear that tomorrow’s mobile marketplace will
be characterised by bandwidth-hungry, real-time services that are
already massively popular in the fixed world. Messaging, blogging,
gaming, P2P and social networking applications will be transformed on
mobile by real-time video, GPS and Push-to-X functionality. Services will
become more personalised, immediate and ‘me-centric’. The design of
portable media players will change when there’s no longer any need to
store Gigabytes’ worth of pictures, videos and music locally on your
device.
Business users, too, will see their workflow transformed by next-
generation mobile broadband. The extremely low latency, high symmetric
speed and low transport costs of tomorrow’s networks will be suited
ideally to real-time videoconferencing and telepresence. Working on the
move will become a seamless extension of your office workspace, with
near-instant to big files and corporate resources.
For the operators of more than 230 WCDMA/HSPA networks their
eventual destination that promises a richer, more immersive service
environment is undoubtedly 3G LTE (Long Term Evolution).
Based on an all-IP core plus a new radio interface based on OFDM, LTE
promises downlink peak data rates up to 100 Mbps with increased
spectral efficiency and more capacity for simultaneous users in the same
cell. Offering exceptional flexibility in the use of operators’ current and
future spectrum assets, LTE is equally at home in paired or unpaired
spectrum. And while its full potential will be realised in bandwidths of up
to 20MHz, it’s also quite feasible to deploy LTE in far smaller tranches of
just a few Megahertz.
The check-list of attractions doesn’t stop there. LTE’s low latency and
ground-up support for packet services will take the mobile experience far
closer to the look-and-feel of fixed access networks. What’s more, more
flexible service provisioning for operators will be complemented by simpler
interworking with fixed networks.
From a carrier’s point of view, the economics of LTE are compelling.
Manufacturers are offering a cost-effective route for 3G operators to
migrate their radio networks to LTE by reusing parts of their existing
infrastructure. Underpinning these technical arguments are simple
considerations of size. With a global GSM/UMTS footprint of more than 3
billion customers, subscribers already benefit directly from incredible
economies of scale manifested as affordable tariffs and a dazzling range
of terminals at all price points from a few dollars upwards. And as we
learned in June this year, technical trials by the NGMN Alliance have
confirmed 3GPP LTE/SAE as the first system that comes closest to
meeting NGMN’s stated goals. The market ecosystem – and the industry
momentum – behind LTE is impossible to ignore.
The vision for LTE is revolutionary. But the journey getting there is
anything but. Evolution from HSPA to LTE will be a smooth, organic
process via HSPA+, the next step in 3GPP’s ongoing standardisation
process that fine-tunes the performance of HSPA. In terms of
timescales, HSPA+ will extend the value of HSPA network investments
well into the next decade. Furthermore, it will be an attractive option for
HSPA operators, giving them a cost-effective platform to offer
competitive high-speed data services while LTE matures.
HSPA+ (and ultimately LTE) promises us an exciting wireless future. As
the capabilities of HSPA evolve, mobile broadband will profoundly change
the way people communicate and connect. Tomorrow’s consumers and
business users will expect a mobile multimedia experience that’s as
satisfying as fixed broadband. Electronic devices will demand wide area
connectivity and a range of new exciting applications delivered and
managed wirelessly. People-to-machine and machine-to-machine
communications may well become important market segments in their
own right. But just as 3G has transformed today’s mobile value chain,
evolution to LTE will effect a similar transformation in tomorrow’s
operator business models.
With this in mind, in the UMTS Forum we are investigating the key issues
that will shape tomorrow’s mobile broadband landscape. Published later
this year, a major new UMTS Forum report “The Future LTE / Mobile
Broadband Ecosystem” will assess the complex interplay between the
roles of network operators, device manufacturers and developers of
value added services.
Specifically, the new study will examine how tomorrow’s LTE networks
will complement and add further value to today’s investments in HSPA.
What brand-new services and applications will LTE enable? And how will
it enhance the user experience of current services? How will it impact on
nascent markets like M2M and Mobile TV? What will tomorrow’s chipsets,
terminals and embedded devices look like? Will we see broadband
wireless access embedded in games consoles, personal media players,
PDAs, in-car systems and other consumer electronics devices? And will
we witness a new tier of converged device that offers users a choice of
access methods to content and connectivity on the move – via LTE,
digital broadcast platforms and other wireless access modalities? Most
importantly of all, what will all this mean for operator’s business models?
First commercial deployments of LTE networks aren’t expected before a
2010 – 2011 timeframe. But while LTE still lies a few years in the future,
imaging how the world will look is no mere crystal-ball gazing exercise.
Thanks to HSPA we’re already seeing tomorrow’s broadband ecosystem
starting to take shape. Consumers and business users are quickly getting
used to megabit-plus speeds on the move. Big-name players from the
Internet and media worlds are already making their presence felt via high-
profile tie-ups with mobile operators in Asia, Europe and the Americas.
Convergence, meanwhile, is re-shaping the landscape as barriers
between mobile and fixed line, the Internet and broadcasting keep
tumbling. The new value chain we confidently predicted that 3G would
create a decade ago is a flourishing reality. And even while we’re waiting
patiently for LTE, we are seeing operators bring new services to launch
faster than ever before – many of them here in Asia.
Surely it is Asian operators who will be among the first to exploit the
technological potential of LTE, translating it into real-world services,
revenues and customer numbers. It’s developed Asia, in other words,
that will give us an early view of tomorrow’s mobile broadband
ecosystem. If you want to know what the future looks like, it’s
happening right here.
Jean-Pierre Bienaimé is Chairman of the UMTS Forum. He is a panelist in
the session ‘Next Generation Value Added Services’ on Wednesday 03
Sept at 16:30 (Jupiter Room 6) at ITU Telecom Asia 2008.
Visit the ITU Online Show Daily for coverage of ITU Telecom Asia 2008, scheduled for 2-5 September.
|
