In some ways, the issue of future business and revenue models for fourth generation mobile services is a replay of similar questions asked about the third generation mobile networks when they were launched. Some of the questions are tactical, such as the matter of which charging methods to use with which customer segments. Read more here.
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To some extent the basic framework for 4G revenues relies on multi-product bundling, such as offering mobile broadband, voice, text messaging, other applications such as music and video content, vertical market services for enterprises or machine-to-machine applications and services.
Mobile payments, banking and potential partner services also are getting lots of attention. The big issue is how much revenue upside might exist beyond access, voice, texting and content services.
In the United States, 4G wireless networks will garner more than 30 million subscribers by mid-2012, about 10 percent of the more than 300 million subscribers, the Yankee Group predicts. Take those 30 million customers, multiply them by the U.S. average revenue per user of $43 a month, and there will be a $15 billion market for 4G connectivity services in 2012, about $18 billion globally. But the big question is how big applications and services provided by third parties might be, in 2012.
Read more here.
Yankee Group predicts revenue from enterprise cloud services will surpass $22 billion in 2014, for example, and the issue is how much of that will be in the form of "access" and how much in terms of application and subscription revenue. One would predict that most of that amount will be earned by application providers, not access providers.
The Yankee Group also predicts that more than $26 billion will be earned by sales of software and applications from mobile app stores in in 2014. Assume developers get 70 percent of that amount and app store suppliers about 30 percent. Almost none at all will be earned by mobile service providers.
None of those issues are unique to 4G. Similar issues exist in the 3G realm Read more.
"Experiences" increasingly are the "products" around which business models are built. For mobile service providers, the issue is to embed themselves more centrally into the creation of such "products."
There is not much question but that value-added services such as VoIP have become critical for the monetization of 4G network investments, researchers at Wireless 20/20 say. Read more here. The firm points out that 4G wireless operators can significantly increase their ARPU and improve their ROI by offering Voice over IP (VoIP) as compared to offering data only services.
Such observations at this point are profoundly obvious. Economies of scope (selling multiple products to customers) have been crucial in the telecommunications business for quite some time. Triple play and quadruple play services are the best examples.
The study further concludes that many operators could see an added improvement in their return on investment by deploying cloud-based delivery solutions as compared to directly managing in-house VoIP platforms. In fact, that argument might broadly apply to voice services on a wider scale. Read more here.
Intense pricing pressure in the voice services business has been a fact of industry life for a decade. One might argue correctly that the reason SBC ultimately bought all of AT&T was that AT&T's international calling business had been in a several decades long decline, and AT&T was not able to create a new revenue stream to replace what it was losing in long distance services, despite strenuous efforts. That is not an isolated issue. International voice operations in general are getting more difficult, as a financial proposition, which is why iBasis has anchored its whole business in providing outsourced international voice services for global service providers.
TDC, the leading telecommunications company in Denmark, in 2008 outsourced its international wholesale voice business to iBasis, a KPN business unit, which also became the exclusive provider of international voice services for TDC in a five-year strategic outsourcing arrangement. iBasis Newsroom.
In the global mobility business, service providers already have started outsourcing or sharing tower infrastructure with their competitors, as this reduces capital investment for all the participating carriers. Read more here.
According to the research, launching 4G VoIP service will result in a 25 percent to 50 percent increase in average revenue per user, a 10 percent increase in incremental rates of return and a five-fold to 10-fold increase in net present value compared to a data-only service strategy.
That should be blindingly obvious, as selling two products to one customer will generate more revenue than selling either product separately to a customer.
Gary Kim is a contributing editor for MobilityTechzone. To read more of Gary’s articles, please visit his columnist page.Edited by
Rich Steeves 
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