Jim
Machi, Vice President, Marketing, Dialogic Corporation: The Challenges for the mobile Internet
Opening
the short presentation, Machi noted that everyone in the room had three
devices, and that this was not unusual. As a result, he said, "data growth
is huge, especially here in APAC."
That
growth will continue, he forecast, as tablet numbers are growing and they use
25 times more data than phones. " Video is an especially huge
challenge," he said. "How do you handle it all? How do you make money
out of it - data revenues are different from voice revenues. Also how operators
build a business model given the increasing volumes of over-the-top provider's
data?"
He
said that the impact on average revenue per user (ARPU) meant that this was
declining for operators who have voice and for those who have voice and data -
but that voice-only is declining even faster. "Subscriber happiness
because of network congestion is a problem especially in crowded areas,"
he said.
For
Machi, this left mobile operators with a number of options:
-
Data offload - get users to use wifi not 3G as much as possible.
-
Network upgrade eg LTE/4G.
-
New technology
-
Deploy new capacity - for example, build new towers
-
Cap data for data hogs
-
Optimisation - "we offer this," he said - which means squeeze and
compress data to get more out of the bandwidth.
"What
can a service provider do?", asked Machi. "They can be a bitpipe
provider, a smart pipe provider, or they can add value added services which
bring in 20% more revenue than dumb pipes. Operators need to find those new
services now."
Machi
was then interviewed in the hot seat by Dubash, who asked about the future for
the operators, and both whether and how they could make the move up from being
dumb pipe providers to being content providers. Machi said that he was not
optimistic, but said that the operator industry would see consolidation or some
would not last. "It will be survival of the fittest," he said.
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