Thursday, March 10, 2011

Singapore Mobile users are more data hungry..

Source: Fiercebroadbandwireless


FierceWireless: Are you looking at tiered pricing or application-based charging?
Montefiore: The CEO of France Telecom was speaking at the GSMA Leadership Forum and he said that 60 percent of the data traffic is generated by 10 percent of the base. In Singapore 90 percent of the data traffic is generated by 3 percent of the base. Some are paying too much and some are paying too little. We really have to rebalance this. And it's up to the operators within the GSMA to get together and figure this out.

Above lines are directly copied from Fiercewireless website. For more interesting comments please check the direct link above.

If I've to comment, I'd say this is mainly due to the market positioning. In Singapore all three TELCO's positioned Mobile data as a replacement rather than complimentary to Fixed broadband. Just like how Mobile phones became personal and replaced the home fixed phones, the mobile internet positioned to replace the fixed internet at homes. We've young couples who didn't subscribed to DSL or Cable internet at homes and just relying on iPhones or Samsungs for their internet connectivity. With the wonderful coverage we've in Singapore this further spurs the replacement.

Also the cost (~SGD 10-15 for unlimited monthly) which is perhaps the lowest in the region further accelerated the adoption. So we've people who subscribed to mobile internet and using bittorrent or file downloads or P2P streaming almost continuously.

Now, I am sure the three telco's engineers and managers are looking to reduce their costs & how to normalize the behavior. All of them are doing Traffic Shaping via Fair Usage Policies (FUP) and trying to offload traffic to Wi-Fi or fixed internet. I'll continue with another post on the offloading, policy options & challenges.

No comments:

Post a Comment