Yankee Group Reveals 2012 Mobility Predictions

Operators will feel the instability as they look to new policy solutions to help them monetize all-IP networks in 2012, Yankee Group said in its new report called “2012 Mobility Predictions: A Year of Living Dangerously.”

Yankee Group suggested that even Internet players should prepare for a year of change that will create new challengers for industry leadership.

“The world is in transition and in the year ahead, mobile will be both the protagonist and subject of this instability,” said Jason Armitage, senior analyst and co-author of the report, in a statement. “The winners in this evolving landscape will be those players that can capitalize on the global mobile gold rush and treat each user as a unique customer.”

In its report, Yankee Group says that the mobile industry is preparing for a year of uncertainty and global transition in 2012. As the fiscal balance tips to new economies, mobile players must adapt or disappear. Mobile workers and consumers will embrace tablets, mobile content, mobile video and personal cloud services at unprecedented levels.

Yankee Group's 2012 mobility predictions are:

• Asia will beat out both Europe and the U.S. in tablet sales. Asia-Pacific will see almost 39 million tablet sales next year.
• RIM smartphones will continue to account for more than 1 in 4 smartphones in U.S. enterprises and remain in double digits with U.S. smartphone owners.
• Android will go from a third-place position to an even share alongside iPhone and BlackBerry.
• Emerging markets operators will invest more in HSPA+ than LTE.
• Spending in the IP-based Diameter segment will more than double, growing from $22 million to $45 million.
• Cloud RAN’s requirement for extensive dark fiber runs will limit it to only a few very large cities.
• Nearly 1 in 5 professionals with three or more devices will adopt a personal cloud service for online storage, backup and synching.
• Video consumption on tablets will more than double in the first six months.
• Most enterprises will choose HTML5 technologies over native coding for customer-facing mobile applications.
• More than half of mobile malware signatures will target Android.
• By 2013, 75 percent of new M2M deployments in North America will use 3G or 4G.
• As stakeholders vie to own mobile payments, at least one entity--and perhaps many--will emerge to act as a neutral third party or uber-Trusted Service Manager (TSM).
• At least one U.S. prepaid operator will beat out post-paids on Net Promoter Score (NPS). Straight Talk will surpass postpaid U.S. providers by at least 12 basis points on this critical customer experience metric.
• Economic issues will contribute to an additional 7 million Europeans switching providers. Average monthly churn will increase to 2.4 percent by year's end.

Recently, Yankee Group announced that enterprises are moving to the cloud. Around 48 percent of the respondents said remote/mobile user connectivity is driving the enterprises to deploy software as a service. This is significant as there is a 92 percent increase over 2010.