Sustaining the future growth of mobile data traffic

Last week, Ericsson revealed that mobile data traffic surpassed mobile voice calls on networks worldwide for the first time last December. Here, Rimma Perelmuter gives her views on the explosion of mobile data and the challenges the industry may face in sustaining future growth:

“The fact that mobile data has now overtaken voice calls worldwide shows how the entire mobile media value chain has worked together to offer consumers rich mobile services that they want to use. The kind of services really driving this growth today include applications, social networking and increasingly, rich multimedia content such as video and music.

MEF identified that growing consumer demand for data-heavy services will put greater pressure on networks, with flat rate data tariffs increasingly subjected to stringent download limits as part of MEF’s Top Ten Media Trends for 2010. To meet the continuing increase in consumer demand for data heavy mobile media services, the industry has already started to look at new and alternative business models as part of the MEF Enablers Initiative. Enabling services will be of fundamental importance to the mobile media industry, because they determine the quality of the user experience the industry can offer its consumers. With this in mind, MEF’s Enablers Initiative is creating an industry-wide framework of enabling services, which may include handset capabilities, credit status and location look up, which network operators can offer to third parties to enhance their content.

In addition, the Enablers initiative explores new business models that will need to be put into place in order to sustain and increase mobile data consumption. Once such model currently being trialed in the UK is sender pays data, which enables content providers to provide their content, whether it be video, an application or music, to the consumer without the consumer having to pay a data charge for it. It helps the operators cover the costs of the growing data traffic and to increase revenues in line with network loading. It also increases transparency and fosters consumer trust in mobile services and the brands who promote them.”

O2 Litmus add to their APIs

Following on from our previous post on Vodafone’s promise to mobile application builders to create a dedicated channel to market and a billing system for their services, we’ve heard the news that O2 Litmus has released four new APIs that will allow developer to query everything from the users location, through to what type of device a customer is using, down to whether they have an ‘all you can eat’ mobile data bolt on provisioned on their account.

Rather than cloud the APIs meaning from consumers, O2 Litmus has used "Enabler" as a jargon free name for an API and explained in simple terms how the Enablers provide access to features of the O2 UK network and infrastructure in a secure and managed way. This allows consumers and the content industry to be better educated about what Smartpipe Enablers are the positive potential that they carry. Their jargon-free description of Enablers is as follows:

“Think of Enablers like "plugs" into the O2 UK network. With your permission, App Developers can use these Enablers to retrieve information that helps them to make more compelling services that are tailored to you.”

They then go on to list example uses for types of information an app could retrieve to customise the user experience. As with the Vodafone framework, this openness and transparency is welcome, as success is intimately dependent upon the quality – reliability and simplicity – of the user experience.

MEF will be publishing the results from its Smart Pipe Enablers Market Survey this summer and this will be followed by the first of several White Papers outlining the agreed Service Definitions for Enablers such as bulk SMS, premium billing, short code rental, age-verification, identity authentication and location look-ups amongst many others to work towards a coherent and co-ordinated approach to enablers that delivers cross-operator alignment, sustainable commercial models and regulation of smart pipe enabling services.