Mobile Personalization

The growth of 3G and (soon!) 4G mobile data applications, from video to voice over IP, is great news for stakeholders and investors.

 

But what about the service providers who lose out on the big bucks while these intensive applications are taking up space on their networks?

 

Helping SPs make money off data is one of the biggest ongoing challenges service providers face, as they deal with exponential mobile data growth. And, according to some, it’s only going to get worse.

 

“One of the key challenges we see is in parallel the rapidly deploying 3G technology and the buildout,” said David Sharpley, senior vice president for marketing and product management, Bridgewater Systems (News - Alert), during a recent podcast interview with TMCnet. “I think one of the things that we continue to ignore is the significant investment that still takes place on a global basis around 3G, whilst in parallel; operators are racing to deploy 4G in order to meet up with the insatiable demand for mobile data or mobile Internet services.”

 

To help operators in that race toward 4G, Bridgewater Systems has positioned itself as a provider of mobile personalization services, such as billing applications for heavy data users, and functions that let users to choose how much bandwidth to allocate to different applications and monitor application usage in real time to prevent bill shock.

 

Still, as devices get more sophisticated, keeping up with technological growth will present yet another challenge, said Sharpley.  

 

“We’ve all seen the huge success of the iPhone (News - Alert), but there are also machine to machine applications, other smart devices as well as mobile data dongles, all of which are driving significant mobile data traffic growth,” Sharpley said. “What’s happening in their networks as a result of that proliferation of those devices and the race of 4G, is an exponential growth in mobile data traffic, yet only a linear growth in mobile data revenue.”