The rollout of 4G services throughout last year and the many global rollouts planned for this year point to the gradual shift of mobile networks to higher speeds and increased capacity. Last year alone, 360 mobile operators launched commercial LTE services across 124 countries while another 49 operators launched LTE-A services covering 31 countries, according to a report by GSMA. GSMA expects the number of LTE-A launches to double this year.
Carrier aggregation has enabled 4G speeds to go above theoretical speeds of 300Mbps and trials are underway to boost the speeds further. LTE and LTE-A have hence become synonymous with the fastest speeds, and how much digital content a user can consume on his mobile device. These speeds have since catalyzed the strategic repositioning of mobile operators as digital service providers, where operators offer digital content alongside their traditional voice and data services as means to diversify their business and tap into the fast growing and highly promising digital content market.
Vodafone UK CEO, Jeroen Hoencamp, in his recent statement which was published in the company's blog, points to intensification of operators' effort in the digital content space. Jeroen commented that given that there isn't really a need for speeds beyond 20Mbps even for bandwidth intensive applications such as streaming video, the current focus among operators is to start providing highly demanded digital content that customers can access on their mobile devices anytime and in any place. “Many customers don’t know what 4G is,” the blog post quoted Jeroen as saying. “Many customers don’t care what 4G is. All customers want is consistency, so that wherever they go they have strong signal, so that they can do what they want wherever they are. And you want to know that it’s really a step up from what you’ve seen before. So if you show people 4G as part of a big bundle with unlimited calls and texts, lots of data and content from Sky Sports, Spotify or Now TV Entertainment, then that’s the way to do it."
Jeroen's take on digital content and how all that matters to end users is their experience consuming this content may indicate that the quest for speed may be over and in its place, mobile operators are embarking on finding the best content for their subscribers and delivering the best experience on this content. Operators will therefore be pumping in huge investment dollars to beef up their content delivery networks and the delivery of rich content, specifically mobile video services while optimizing the network for best end user experience. A number of major partnerships between large digital content providers and mobile operators were inked last year, and the likes of Spotify, Rhapsody, Slacker and Netflix are seeing more mobile operators knocking on their doors.
This comes at a time where the mobile screen is fast becoming the preferred screen for video streaming, according to a report by Vuclip. In another report, Ooyala, a provider of solutions for video publishing, analytics and monetization, said that in the last two years, the number of videos viewed on tablets and smartphones rose by 400%. The company expects that by end of this year, tablets and smartphones will make up 50% of total online video views and added that users have started using these devices to view long-form content (videos more than 10 minutes). The trend clearly puts mobile operator's multiscreen services at an advantage as people want their online content to be accessible not only on their TV screens and computers, but also on their mobile devices and other 'mobile' digital screens such as those in the connected cars.
Audio and video streaming are just two verticals from the many other digital services that mobile operators have started exploring. M2M/IoT services, cloud platforms, mobile payments, mobile shopping and mobile health as well as connected car infotainment services present operators the opportunity to roll out a host of other digital content in the form of mobile apps, mobile audio and mobile TV that more and more users are expected to subscribe to as the dependency on real-time information and on-demand content consumed on mobile devices continues to grow.
Jeroen Hoencamp, CEO, Vodafone UK
It’s not about who’s got the most coverage. ...It’s more about having the strongest signal. We’d love to expand the network faster, but it’s about doing it right first time; I’d rather do it at the pace we’re doing and get it right, than try to go faster and build a thin and flimsy network. You can have a few sites here and there, but that would give you really patchy signal. We only turn 4G on when we have built or updated enough sites. So instead of just having 4G in the centre of a town and saying that the whole town has 4G, we don’t say it’s there until it’s there. It’s about us being able to prove that people are happy with it.....That said, we believe our 4G network is really futureproof. It’s here to stay for a long time, but what we offer will always continue to improve. We’ll add more content partners, and there will be new technologies overlaid which will make the network even better, and even faster. It’ll never stop. ....And we’ll continue to make things seamless.
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