Liberty Global plans to create a pan-European mobile virtual network operator operation, beginning in the Netherlands, Belgium, Switzerland, Austria, and the United Kingdom, something Liberty Global has been working on for a year or more.
As mobile and fixed operator Vodafone has determined, ownership of both mobile and fixed assets enables construction of quadruple play offers to incrementally grow revenue, as did earlier triple play offers.
That is one more response to highly-competitive communications and entertainment markets where subscriber growth is difficult to impossible, and revenue growth has to be achieved by boosting the amount of money a service provider can earn from a smaller base of customers.
There are a few notable elements to Liberty Global’s strategy, the first being the potential importance of quadruple play offers as a revenue growth approach. The second element is the impact of scale on the viability of a mobile service offered by a cable operator.
The final element is the network assets and capital investment approach. In becoming an MVNO, Liberty Global avoids the huge investment in mobile spectrum and transmission assets, while adding a fourth anchor product to its bundle.
Liberty Global has preferred an asset light mobile strategy in Europe since at least 2013, when Liberty signed wholesale capacity agreements with Telefonica 02, Orange, Vodafone and Mobistar.
Virgin Media, now owned by Liberty Global, also has had a mobile virtual network operator business in the United Kingdom.
Vodafone’s purchase of Kabel Deutschland, which allowed Vodafone to enter the cable TV business, is a mirror image of the Liberty Global Strategy. In both cases, broadband, video and mobile service are the anchor and strategic services, even if voice is a key feature of the bundle.
For Liberty Global, fixed network services are not enough; for Vodafone, mobile services alone are not enough.
But there is one key difference. Liberty Global views the bundling of mobile services as a defensive move; something to match other quad-play provider offers at reasonable cost.
Vodafone sees fixed network assets as an offensive move, allowing it to create enterprise and consumer revenue streams that can most effectively be provided by a fixed network, and complementing mobility revenues by fixed network revenues.
But where Liberty Global is going “asset light” to add one more service, Vodafone is using an “asset heavy” approach, albeit because the fixed assets will provide strategic benefits for Vodafone’s mobile offerings (such as supporting mobile data offload, small cells, hotspots and backhaul).
Edited by
Cassandra Tucker 
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