The growing availability of LTE smartphones has delivered a significant boost to the technology over the last 6 months and Strategy Analytics has upgraded its forecasts to one billion LTE connections by early 2017. The US, South Korea and Japan are leading the way in 2012, with greater global scale achieved in 2013. By 2017, LTE will generate over one -third of mobile service revenues. Strategy Analytics' report "Worldwide Cellular User Forecast: 2012-2017" provides global forecasts of subscription, technology and revenues, with detail for 82 individual countries.

There will be over 6.6 billion cellular subscriptions worldwide by the end of 2012.

The market continues to slow as a more regions approach levels of saturation. Over 80% of subscriptions added between 2012 and 2017, will come from Asia-Pacific, the Middle East and Africa.  

Cellular subscriptions are outpacing unique users by 48%

Worldwide cellular service revenues will increase by 4% in 2012, a slight decline on the 5% growth witnessed in 2011.

Cellular Subscriptions

(M)                                  2011       2012       2017

W Europe                         556.7      576.0     624.6

CE Europe                        537.6      556.3      583.9

N America                        363.2      386.5      493.2

CL America                      642.3      697.1      841.8

Asia-Pacific                     3019.4    3357.7    4453.4

M East & Africa                 920.3     1026.8    1462.6

Additional questions answered in this forecast include:

How large will the subscription/user gap be in 2013 and 2017?

What share of users and revenue will be from business in 2012? 2017?

How will usage minutes grow from its 2011 level through 2017?

How significant will TD-LTE be in the next five years?

How will users, subscriptions, postpaid vs prepaid, service revenues, churn rates, traffic and ARPU vary across the 82 countries covered?

Client Reading

 

We posted on Monday about some LTE network launches which were announced at MWC, or in the week running up to the show. These were mainly FDD-based network plans. A few more network plans have emerged during the course of the week, with a welcome showing for TDD-based deployments.

Momentum continues to grow for the use of unpaired spectrum for LTE services, with a real mixed bag of countries having commercial networks - Brazil, Japan, Poland and Saudi Arabia are all up and running. In many cases these are examples of operators who do not have sufficient clear paired spectrum to launch FDD-based LTE networks, but own unpaired spectrum. The US will join the commercial TD-LTE market in 2012 with Clearwire's planned deployments, though China and India are the big markets to watch.

At MWC this week we heard from:

• China Mobile, which plans to have 20,000 TD-LTE base stations in operation on test systems by the end of this year and 200,000 base stations for a commercial service by the end of next year. It's TDD-based 3G services (using TD-SCDMA) have left it isolated globally, so the operator is keen to be one of the early volume players in TD-LTE. The operator also confirmed plans to launch dual-mode FDD/TDD LTE services in Hong Kong following its acquisition of 2.3 GHz spectrum there last month;
• UK Broadband, which switched on its TD-LTE network in London on Wednesday, with commercial services planned from May. The network uses Huawei kit and operates in the 3.5-3.6 GHz spectrum bands. UKBB holds 124 MHz of spectrum and will ultimately deliver TD-LTE across 6x20 MHz channels, perfectly highlighting that it is not just the "traditional" mobile operators who have cornered the market for usable spectrum;
• Bharti Airtel, which announced a contract with Nokia Siemens networks to build and manage its TD-LTE network in Maharahstra. The 2.3 GHz network will launch before the end of this year.

An honorable mention should also go to ZTE, who has been highlighting its TD-LTE achievements. It unveiled its multi-mode TD-LTE/WiFi pico base station and ran a live connection to 3 Sweden's dual-mode FDD/TDD LTE network in Stocholm. With a number of chipset vendors showcasing dual-mode LTE chipsets at the show, TD-LTE network opportunities are looking very positive.

 

This year’s Mobile World Congress looks likely to be a useful platform for mobile operators to provide updates on their LTE network deployment plans. There have been a couple of announcements from the show floor so far, though some operators put details out last week to avoid the noise. We are expecting LTE launch plans to emerge throughout the week, but here is a recap of what has come over the last 10 days:

• Deutsche Telekom confirmed an LTE launch by T-Mobile USA in 2013, following the failed AT&T-TMO merger attempt at the end of last year. It is modernizing 37,000 cell sites in 2012/13 as part of this process and through a combination of spectrum refarming and the spectrum dividend it received from AT&T, it will be able to launch with 20 MHz of LTE spectrum (AWS band) in markets covering half of its current HSPA POPs.
• eAccess will launch an integrated UMTS/LTE 1.7 GHz network in Japan next month, supplied by Ericsson and Huawei.
• Everything Everywhere hopes to launch LTE services in the UK by the end of 2012, providing it can get regulatory approval to use its 1800 MHz spectrum. The UK is late to auction 800 MHz and 2.6 GHz spectrum, with UK Broadband also looking to step into the void as it trials TD-LTE at 3.5 GHz.
• Telefonica unveiled its “live test” LTE network (pdf) covering 5 square km of central Barcelona as part of its domestic LTE build. Using Alcatel-Lucent’s lightRadio technology, the companies are positioning this as the world’s 'smartest' 4G network. The network consists of conventional base stations and smaller metro cells, all operating in the same 2.6 GHz frequency band with no interference. It supports speeds up to 100 Mbps downlink and 40-60 Mbps uplink with the partners suggesting each cell can support 30 simultaneous users at 30 Mbps.
• Movicel will launch an LTE network in Angola by the end of May 2012. The network, supplied by Huawei, is the first 1800 MHz FDD LTE network in Africa.

Watch this space for an update later in the week on further launch announcements.

 

OnStar outlined the latest fruits of its collaboration with Verizon Wireless at CES this week. It’s showcasing a Chevrolet Volt research vehicle connected via VZW’s 4G LTE network to deliver a range of content and enhanced communications services – information services, streaming of multimedia content, video-calling, etc. VZW has been promoting LTE to the automotive industry as a way to future-proof their connectivity strategy and support tomorrow's high bandwidth use cases, and this message seems to be hitting home.

The collaboration makes sense on a number of levels:

Firstly, LTE in general can offer a robust (and fast) enough connection to deliver these services in combination. Watching a YouTube video on its own is not a problem for many networks, but simultaneous sessions across the front and rear seat (video content and calling, online gaming, browsing, etc.) really do need to look at LTE as the starting point – a must-have rather than a nice-to-have.

Secondly, VZW’s network is built on 700MHz spectrum (as a starting point) so offers good geographical coverage. Mobile broadband networks have generally been about delivering massive capacity into urban environments. I visited Softbank’s new LTE network in Tokyo last week – built in 2.5GHz spectrum the cell sites were 50-200 meters apart in order to saturate the streets with high-speed signals, delivering 40-50Mbps to multiple devices in our demo bus. But that network won't extend beyond city limits and the automotive industry needs a high bandwidth network which can offer much wider coverage - the 700MHz LTE network is the only real option today.

Finally, LTE is a reality today in the US market and is here to stay. The US is significantly ahead of the rest of the world in building mobile broadband networks in the lower spectrum bands offering the coverage the automotive industry requires. VZW’s network now covers more than 200 million people in 190 markets (ok, I know I’ve just said there is more to this than urban coverage) and will cover its entire 3G footprint with 4G by the end of 2013. So the US automotive industry, more than any other, can develop LTE services now which will still be supported come the end of their product lifecycles.

The next challenge for the automotive industry will be data pricing. Bundling a year's service with new vehicles could get very expensive (for the OEM) very quickly with these multimedia applications, so new pricing models will be key. Our own survey work has shown that consumers would prefer a single shared data plan to connect their array of 3G/4G-enabled devices, rather than one plan per device. That is still very much a work in progress in the US market, but a necessary requirement if we are going to see the automotive and CE industries enjoy the full benefits of LTE.

When a company called Sky buys another called The Cloud while a third called O2 plans to outfox them, there is a joke deciphering part of your brain that just goes into overdrive. But I will leave the telecoms puns to the experts.

The UK public WiFi hotspot market is going to change for good as a result of last week’s deals. Smartphones are increasingly the driver of hotspot connections and it is obviously no coincidence that the early movers in the iPhone business, AT&T and O2 UK, have been the more active in the hotspot market – AT&T acquiring Wayport in 2008 and O2 has been central to The Cloud’s resurgence in recent years (and is now going it alone).

We discussed the benefits of these moves for Sky and O2 in a report today. A WiFi footprint in the kind of places you might want to sit down and catch-up on TV is a great asset for the planned Sky Anywhere service, and building a reputation for delivering a better mobile user experience in places of high data traffic should help O2 given that it hasn’t managed to do this with mobile broadband.

So hotspots are great in the smartphone market and will be important for delivering content to larger screen MIDs and tablets. What we didn’t discuss in this report was the future for hotspots as revenue generators in their own right. That’s because there isn’t much. They might be important in stimulating core revenues on smartphone data plans or content-anywhere services, but even the location owners themselves are becoming more interested in using WiFi to drive core revenues (extra cup of coffee or an extra hotel room) than to generate access revenues.

As smartphone use surges, traditional WiFi hotspot players are seeing their metrics move in the opposite direction:

• KT’s Nespot / olleh WiFi service peaked in 2005 with over 0.5 million subscribers, though has been trending down ever since despite investing in the footprint. Even during 2010, when KT doubled its hotspot location count to 36,000, it has seen subscriber numbers fall 10% to 266,000, and revenues fall 18% (down to 0.9% of KT’s Internet access revenues). It now makes over 7x more revenue from WiBro than from WiFi;

• iPass recorded a 12% annual decline in its access revenues in 3Q 2010 (which includes WiFi hotspot revenues, hotel Ethernet and also still some dial-up, though the latter is less than 5% of its total). It saw an annual decline of 8.9% in the number of users paying an up-front fee for access to 552,000 users, with the number of users paying for ad-hoc access also falling 14% to 192,000.

Again, as a newly integrated operator, KT is not planning to expand to 100,000 hotspot locations in order to turn around that Nespot business – it’s all about enhancing the mobile broadband user experience and managing costs through traffic offload. And the same can be said for Sky and O2.

Yesterday in Paris, Orange unveiled its new five-year strategic plan, Conquests 2015. The plan covers four strategic priorities:

    The conquest of employee pride – to re-build its reputation as an employer;
    The conquest of networks – covering fibre-optic build in France, LTE deployments, the monetization of mobile data traffic (read: no unlimited data plans) and green networks;
    The conquest of customers – delivering a superior customer experience and helping customers navigate through their connected/digital lives;
    The conquest of international development – targeting 2x growth in revenues from emerging markets, with total customers growing from today’s 200m to 300m by 2015.

We published a report profiling the world’s 20 largest mobile operators last week, providing a SWOT and overview of strategic directions. We knew a new Orange vision was on the way, but there are only so many events that can postpone a report’s publication. It is with relief that I can say that, in terms of the key elements of this new strategic plan, enough had been discussed in the past to allow us to predict this quite accurately.

In this report, we looked at two key differentiators for operator performance: footprint (scale) and unification (both in the sense of integrated/converged networks and the provision of integrated services). The more profitable global mobile operators have strengths in these areas and it is good to see they form the basis of Orange’s new strategy.

Orange is very much committed to improving the value of its footprint, both in terms of growing its business in Africa and the Middle East (it is suggesting roughly three-quarters of its emerging market revenue growth could come from M&A here), but also in terms of its mature market footprint, where further consolidation (after the Orange / T-Mobile UK deal) can be expected.

In terms of unification, the next-gen network upgrades are a key building block there, as well as layering in services in areas such as health, education and payments. One of the more interesting statements in this strategy launch was that “Orange must become a multimedia coach for its customers by working alongside them to make their digital life easier”, with Orange’s CEO Stéphane Richard adding that Orange “are trying to be activists for an open world”. That trusted partner role has taken over from the own-branded services/content role as a priority for telcos and it is encouraging that Orange is focusing on its key strengths there.

The bids in Germany’s current spectrum auctions are starting to add up. With a range of spectrum on the table (800MHz, 1800MHz, 2GHz and 2.6GHz), it is the digital dividend 800MHz spectrum that is dominating proceedings – at the end of round 94 the bids totalled €1.9 billion, with nearly 90% of this bid on the 800MHz spectrum. Although there is still some way to go, the auction is already pricing the 800MHz spectrum at more than 30x higher than the 2.6GHz spectrum. The need for denser LTE networks in higher frequency bands will come, but for now 800MHz is much more valuable as it is the most cost effective for delivery of next generation coverage. However, in this instance the government isn’t leaving that to chance as it strives to close the broadband coverage gap in rural areas. Winning bidders have to cover smaller towns before they can move on to larger cities. That is a nice touch by the government. The next few years of spectrum auctions in Europe are unlikely to raise the kind of sums seen in the 2.1GHz 3G auctions of 1999-2001. So getting some public good (other than money for the public purse) out of the auctions makes sense. Building in licence rules to make sure 800MHz spectrum really is used to close the digital divide is logical as 3G/4G mobile broadband adoption soars. So if you live in a rural community that has yet to be touched by DSL/cable and are fed up waiting for a decent 3G mobile broadband signal, the sale of 800MHz spectrum for mobile services and they way coverage is being prioritized in the legislation is good news (provided you can wait a little longer for the spectrum to be cleared of analogue TV). But for the rest of the population in Germany at least, this is probably all very dull. There are only four bidders in this auction (the four existing mobile operators), so it will do nothing for competition and probably nothing for pricing either. Many operators we speak to have a similar view to TeliaSonera and will position LTE as a premium mobile broadband product as they try to pull back from what has often been quite intensive price competition in this fledgling sector.

We are currently updating Q4 operational/financial data in our Wireless Operator Performance Benchmarking research, with the last 7 days seeing a large number of operators report results. There are two over-riding themes coming out of the results so far. Firstly, for most operators Q4 was better than Q3, which is great news. The slight problem is that this is better in the sense of “less worse”. If you get mugged two days in a row, the chances are the mugger will get less off you on the second day – you probably haven’t got a new phone and your spare wallet won’t have all your replacement cards/ID in it yet. So that’s obviously a much better mugging. So the fact that revenues and profits didn’t fall as fast in Q4 as they did in Q3 is equally good, right? Secondly, “relentless” cost control / management is a standard item in strategic directions for 2010. A few operators are predicting flat EBITDA for this year, many are expecting moderate single-digit declines. Mobile data remains the growth engine, but falling revenues from voice/termination/roaming will be hard to overcome. So its cost control that will save operator profitability in 2010: distribution mixes and device subsidies seem to be key items up for debate in most mature markets. I worry for an operator recovery in 2010. The recession will be officially over (it already is in many countries), but unemployment will increase, few workers will be banking on pay rises, private consumption will lag GDP growth (which is itself a real mixed bag across different countries), and governments will push through austere budgets. Plus everyone who put off upgrading their handset last year will want to do it this year, so we will see a higher share of mobile spend diverted to device vendors. Depressed yet? The debt crisis in Greece is perhaps a worst case scenario, though I’ll leave you with this sobering quote from OTE’s results last week: “In 2010, the OTE Group expects its revenue base to be further impacted by difficult economic conditions in all markets, lower consumer spending, intense competition, and regulatory constraints on its capacity to respond effectively to these factors. OTE management … will work hard to minimize revenue shrinkage and defend Group profitability.” OTE will not be the only operator to get mugged again in 2010. Phil Kendall

Softbank Japan will be switching off its 2G mobile network next month, one of the first WCDMA operators in the world to do so. In its financial results on Tuesday it said this would result in a small correction in subscriber numbers, though the revenue impact will be minimal - in Q4 2009, 3.6% of its customers were still on the 2G network, but they contributed just 1.7% of revenues. More importantly, terminating the 2G network is going to contribute to profit growth, so it’s all good news. For Softbank, that is. That’s just over eight years to move from launching a 3G network to closing down the 2G network. Unfortunately, no other operator is going to be running on those timelines, even NTT DoCoMo is going to see 10 years lapse between its 3G launch and 2G closure (down for March 2011).

• Many operators in developed economies are now 6-7 years into their 3G lives and nowhere near the subscriber/revenue ratios seen in Japan in that timescale – most have yet to even get 40% of their subscribers onto 3G.

We spend a large amount of time in our forecast models looking at adoption curves for new technologies, predicting an inflection point for LTE is the latest to tax us. I have just run a speed test on my HTC Hero and (with the wind blowing in the right direction) I am getting 3Mbps down and almost 1Mbps up on a 7.2Mbps HSPA network. It’s hard to sit here today and decide at what point in the future I am going to find that performance completely unacceptable. New technologies are fun, but what is equally interesting for us is looking at the other end of the technology life cycle:

• How should mobile operators manage the retirement of legacy technologies as they transition from 2G to 3G, or from circuit to packet voice?
• At what point is it worth investing more in 3G subsidies for 2G users in order to save money by shutting down the old network?

The analogue to digital switch-over involved migrating a peak of 93 million analogue connections and even that has taken well over a decade to complete – this time around, there will be 4 billion 2G connections to migrate. While Softbank looks forward to lower network operating costs from April, very few other operators will reach that point even by 2015. We see huge promise in LTE and other mobile broadband technologies attracting users away from 2G services, but as vendors fight it out to have the fastest 4G demo at MWC this year it will be interesting to see how much space is devoted to technology co-existence. As regulators move towards technology-agnostic spectrum licensing, there will be a real skill in managing resources across 2G, 3G and 4G technologies and great opportunities for vendors to help operators make the transition away from 2G as painless as possible. Phil Kendall

Telefonica’s acquisition of VoIP service provider Jajah over the Christmas period was an interesting move for a very much traditional telco. Jajah is one of the real success stories in pushing VoIP to the masses. It has pushed far beyond its call-back roots to offer mobile clients for 3G and WiFi-based VoIP calling and, more significantly, adding wholesale solutions (with Yahoo! Voice it’s most significant partner). Jajah launched in March 2006 and had 10 million customers by March 2008 and, helped by the wholesale expansion, 25 million customers by mid 2009. In a consumer (and mobile) VoIP space generally served by many small providers, Jajah is a major force. It is a minnow alongside Skype but then most players in this space are. Skype’s Q3 2009 results showed:    521M registered users,    over 20M users online at peak times,    27.7B minutes of Skype-to-Skype calls (of which over one third were video calls),    3.1B minutes to landlines & cellphones. So will Telefonica and O2 join Hutchison 3G as a mobile operator aggressively pushing VoIP on mobile phones? Well, initially it seems very little will change, with Jajah operating independently and reporting into Telefonica Europe. As an incumbent telco seeing its fixed telephony minutes under threat from VoIP, having a business to compensate for that by stealing minutes in other markets has some benefit. However, the real benefit will come from closer integration and the announcement alludes to this with the European operations to “be the first of Telefonica’s regional business divisions to offer seamless Jajah services to customers wishing to extend their communications experience.” Certainly, Europe’s mobile operators need to embrace affordable international call services. Hutchison 3G has made the leap with iSkoot’s Skype solution, but alongside some of Jajah’s VoIP competitors (fring, RebTel, Truphone, Vyke, etc.) there is an increasingly successful MVNO market offering low-cost international prepaid services. Players in this space (such as Lycamobile, Lebara and KPN’s Ortel) have gone from less than 3 million users at the end of 2007 to more than 10 million at the end of 2009. Collectively, these international call providers are scaling to a point where mobile operators need to respond. They have never relied on international calling as a meaningful revenue flow, but the international offers pull domestic use with them. With over 6% of the EU’s population being classified as foreigners based on citizenship and probably at least twice this number of people having an immigration background, mobile operators need to see international calling as a useful tool to serve an important market segment. Jajah offers Telefonica and O2 an excellent platform to achieve that. - Phil Kendall