Time for innovation in mobile broadband offerings

Stuart Corner
Friday, 13 March 2009 05:59

IT Industry - Market

Mobile broadband offerings from Australian carriers don't differ much except on price, but that could change as the networks become more capacity constrained an operators seek to smooth out peaks and sell spare capacity at other times.

According to Bill Dekker, vice president for Australia, New Zealand and Pacific at mobile messaging company Acision, "The mobile operators are trying to compete with fixed line [broadband]: their services are about the same price but it costs them about five times as much per megabyte to deliver." He said that the average mobile broadband service used as much network capacity as 50 phone calls.

"At the moment a lot of the operators still have capacity, but once that capacity is used up and they have to invest hundreds of millions of dollars to put in more capacity then the whole value proposition starts to look very shaky... They are now all looking at smart tools to manage things more effectively rather than just throwing capacity at it. That is the route we are now seeing operators going."

He said that the key for operators would be to optimise the network whilst minimising the impact on end users. "If there is capacity in the network they may as well use it, so they could offer spot specials: free downloads for the next hour, and so on."

He predicted that it would only be a matter of time before operators started to offer time of day pricing on mobile broadband, along with differentiated home zone and 'roaming' rates. However he said that traffic patterns on mobile networks could be very unpredictable and operators would need good management tools tied into their billing platforms in order to maximise return on their network investments.

Dekker also took issue with the accepted view that the impact of the merger between Vodafone Australia and Three will primarily impact number two player, Optus. "The biggest threat will be to Telstra because at the rates they charge at the moment they are commanding a premium...Optus has held their own against two strong challenger brands and I think Telstra will continue to lose market share as [other carriers] invest in regional Australia where Telstra has dominance."