4G SERVICES – MARKET OPPORTUNITIES AND IMPLICATIONS

 

 

4G SERVICES – MARKET OPPORTUNITIES AND IMPLICATIONS

You have a genuine question: Why should I use 4G? You have been using voice and data services over many years now.

The benefits of 4G services and products will enable a greater range of services and use – cases. Next generation of networks will lead to the emergence of a diverse range of eco-systems that better support the various players via new business models servicing a wide range of segments, customers and uses.

Digging a little deeper, the rationale behind super 4G services are faster throughput, lower latency and lower costs per Mbps. You will see improvement in 2 areas: (1) delivering existing services better and faster, (2) delivering new services that satisfy needs not met so far. The question to be more fully addressed is how will subscribers truly benefit from the technology of great and are  carrier’s in best position to actually support and introduce the services. In the near term, it will be important to understand where 4G offers improvements over 3G etc and why that might matter to existing customers of internet, data products, smart phones, 3G etc. This question needs to be answered.

We believe there are 5 major areas of impact resulting from 4G that need to be expected to better answer this question: (1) technology performance, (2) new mobile applications enablement, (3) addressable device expansion, (4) differentiated customer experience and (5) business models significance and evolution from the view point of consumers.

From here you can either go to conclusions at the end of the blog directly or you can go through the elaboration of aforementioned 5 areas. This will depend on your inclination and time available.

1. Technology performance improvement: 4G technologies offer at least 2x more efficient use of spectrum, higher max speed, and improved support for real-time applications. 4G integrates with the current/past layers well and 4G is being developed very seriously in such countries like USA which have taken long term position on 4G. They have also committed resources and have commenced deployment in a very committed fashion. So 4G adoption makes immediate as well as near term sense.
2. New mobile application enablement: Enables new mobile applications (like tele-presence) and enhances existing ones (streaming music, smart home monitoring, digital storage, etc). Services like streaming video, gaming and specialised applications such as interactive learning and connected cars to game most from the 4G technology deployment.

Therefore, it is necessary to have a very close look at these services and applications               that are expected to be fully enabled by 4G services.

3. Addressable device expansion: Heavy data uses will be greatly enabled by 4G. The                   increasingly open eco-system, enabled by 4G, presents challenging opportunities as               3^rd parties develop applications and customization looks to meet user needs.                             Devices are becoming highly configurable through open standards and more                              specialised devices – networks, tablets, eReaders, etc are entering the markets.

We will do micro segmentation based device roadmap to support adoption of                              converged mobile devices and applications.

4. Differentiated customer experience: We do know that consumer expectations                      around price points are resetting with mounting expectations to pay “a little for a                      little” which challenges the current pricing and monetization approaches.

We also believe that customers are expecting more bundling of services in to a                          “solution” that supports the way customers live. This will facilitate most likely uses of             4G and help building an important size and shape of 4G services centric eco-system.

5. Business model evolutions: There are critical problems with prevailing prices and               payment practices. We are considering options wherein we move towards tiered                       pricing based on typical factors such as speed, time and quality of service.

Another potential service model is bandwidth on demand and the correlated pricing              approach to charge premium pricing for these burst requests. This will prove                               beneficial to planned high bandwidth consuming levels such as streaming videos or               mobile TV.

Given what we know today, 4G will require expansion of payment models to include to            favour lower upfront costs (subscriptions, one time purchases, ad-based, freemium             and per-use).  Clearly new 4G service use cases and eco-system arrangements which               lead to the important question of who will generate the bill and how will the revenues           be shared.

We are in a position to provide solutions which are research based and best in class               suiting the requirement of targeted micro segments. Social Media and                                             Telecommunication analytics combined with big data and predictive analytics enable             hitherto unheard actionable insights.

CONCLUSION

The real story around 4G services are the inherent business improvements which bring unprecedented and lasting benefits to the customers. 4G will enable delivering new applications via unique partnership portals, supported by intelligent systems and controls that have cross-platform operability.

After this blog you can now ask better and more questions. You can also spread the word about 4G by sharing the blogs with your friends, family and partners. You can share your solutions or apprehensions, your comments, your suggestions or pose questions right at this forum.  You are technology savvy and intelligent customer and can help in proper development, deployment and adoption of 4G services.

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