50% of European calls via mobiles by 2008
Link: Half of European calls to be mobile by 2008 | The Register
Telecom and IT consultants Analysys are predicting half of all phone calls made in Europe will be made on our mobiles by 2008.
According to their report, Finland is the most mobile-using nation in Europe, with 74.6% of all phone calls made on the go during 2006. In Germany, 24.3% of all calls originated on mobile networks during the same period.
However, there’s a twist. This increase is not due to us making more calls on our mobiles - instead we’re relying on traditional fixed lines less. Good news for the mobile networks, but not so great for the traditional telcos.Â
Finally the industry seems to be standing up and taking notice that Fixed Mobile Substitution (FMS) is actually happening.
Whilst mobile operators have woken up to the realities of FMS, they seem to be differing on strategy. HomeZones have recently generated significant interest, but if operators are to raise revenues they can ill afford to use existing technologies such as Cell-ID. This location technology has been responsible for considerable amounts of revenue leakage in Germany due to its poor accuracy, giving location technologies a bad name.
If as Analysys predict, half of all phone calls are made over the mobile, the death of the traditional landline is near. To avoid the death of the mobile operator, because of the massive revenue leakage (giving away free or cheap calls when customers are not really at home), they need to consider newer location technologies that sit on the user’s SIM card to reduce revenue leakage impacts by up to 50 times. Smaller zones = higher HomeZone / FMS profitability which is great news for the mobile operator wanting to attack fixed line operators using FMS.
Posted by Andrew Grill on August 1st, 2007 at 4:13 pm.