Mobile Market and Network Planning - Part 3

1.1         Lagging Revenue Growth

·         To date, operators have been unsuccessful in translating the data-growth into revenue growth resulting in significantly lower top line growth versus data growth. In developed regions, revenue per gigabyte is forecast to fall from USD23.21 in 2010 to USD4.27 by 2015. Moreover, regulatory pressures do decrease roaming prices and mobile termination rates are having a negative impact on voice revenues.

·         Operators are seeking new sources of revenue with changes to current flat-rate pricing to data caps  and tiered-pricing and by introducing a host of new services. New video services, in particular, are popular, but are consuming vast amounts of capacity, requiring the operators to add capacity faster than their revenue is growing.

1.2         Rising Operator Margin Pressure

·         The combination of dramatic traffic growth and slow revenue growth is putting pressure on mobile operator profit margins (see  Figure 2 08D0C9EA79F9BACE118C8200AA004BA90B02000000080000000E0000005F005200650066003200370037003500380031003700310034000000 below) Operators are therefore looking for increased efficiency in capex and opex spend through the optimisation of their networks.

Figure   2: Comparison of the network economics of mobile networks