Opinionated comments on mobile phone industry news
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All entries are written by Anders Borg, CEO and Consultant of Abiro, that has a long experience in strategic planning, developing embedded and Java software, usability aspects, and the mobile phone industry in general. You can also read the latest Mobile News entries on your phone via wap.abiro.com, and we provide many News Feeds from popular news services. For advertising and contribution queries, please use the feedback form. News feed (local) FeedBurner Feed
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Thursday, September 21, 2006
Operators choking the mobile service business?
It's 7 years since DoCoMo introduced its system of charging content/service providers 9% of the revenue and still operators in Europe in some cases charge more than half of the revenue and still relies on primitive Premium SMS instead of direct payments to the phone bill via the service sites, according to this note. Will we Europeans (and Americans) ever learn?
Hurting the discussion is that even this note - that's pro a better ratio and setup - talks about mobile data. We should talk about mobile services and only that. The real and unexploited value is in the services, not the bit pipe. Consumers care less about the bit pipe. It should only be fast and inexpensive.
What I'd like to see is flat rate mobile data subscriptions together with a sensible business model and revenue split that drives growth of mobile services and that still gives enough to the operators so they can enhance their networks. Service providers and consumers control the success of services. Operators can only enable - or strangle - them.
Quote: Less positive for operators was the finding that only 15pc of content purchased will be part of an ongoing subscription model.
Also seen in other surveys, consumers shun subscriptions and prefer one-shot purchases, which shows consumers are smart.
Side-note: I and some colleagues were in Japan 1999 and met with DoCoMo, just when they rolled out i-mode. Little did we know then what success i-mode would become. Interestingly we already then thought this could be applied to Europe. i-mode is available in Europe now, but frankly I hear little about it.
SiliconRepublic.com: Operators stymie mobile commerce, Valista claims
This might be an interesting additional read:
i-mode History
Hurting the discussion is that even this note - that's pro a better ratio and setup - talks about mobile data. We should talk about mobile services and only that. The real and unexploited value is in the services, not the bit pipe. Consumers care less about the bit pipe. It should only be fast and inexpensive.
What I'd like to see is flat rate mobile data subscriptions together with a sensible business model and revenue split that drives growth of mobile services and that still gives enough to the operators so they can enhance their networks. Service providers and consumers control the success of services. Operators can only enable - or strangle - them.
Quote: Less positive for operators was the finding that only 15pc of content purchased will be part of an ongoing subscription model.
Also seen in other surveys, consumers shun subscriptions and prefer one-shot purchases, which shows consumers are smart.
Side-note: I and some colleagues were in Japan 1999 and met with DoCoMo, just when they rolled out i-mode. Little did we know then what success i-mode would become. Interestingly we already then thought this could be applied to Europe. i-mode is available in Europe now, but frankly I hear little about it.
SiliconRepublic.com: Operators stymie mobile commerce, Valista claims
This might be an interesting additional read:
i-mode History
