Embee Mobile jetted to SoCal last week for the CTIA Conference in San Diego. It was a great opportunity to do business, and to hear from industry leaders their views on the future of wireless services. Bottom line – mobile is a great place to be, but there are still competing visions of where we are headed.
During the CTIA Keynote Address:
Ralph de la Vega, CEO of AT&T Mobility and Consumer Markets, presented a ton of exciting data. The US wireless industry, for instance, is growing five times faster than the overall economy, as evidenced by the proliferation of mobile apps – over 900 million in the US – and massive increase in data usage – an increase of 5,000% over the past 3 years! And given increasing demands for mobile services on an already stretched infrastructure, these numbers will continue to rise for the foreseeable future.
Sounds like a great business to be in! Hence the fragmented state of mobile services. 177 different mobile operators, largely constituted of MVNOs, and 630 mobile devices sold by 30+ companies. Lots of choice, lots of competition. Hence, the past year’s prepaid pricing war, largely exhibited by operators cramming more and more services into lower priced unlimited plans.
But de la Vega sees things differently. On the final day of CTIA, AT&T took a stand in the price war and announced a higher priced unlimited prepaid plan at $60 per month. The plan is comparable to other all-you-can-eat plans, although it does include picture and video messaging, as well as calls to Canada and Mexico. Could be risky, but it’s a clear signal that AT&T intends to compete in the prepaid space.
Following de la Vega was David Ko, SVP of Yahoo! Mobile. After commenting that people who use both their PC and mobile device to check Yahoo! spend 82% more time on the site than those that only access Yahoo! through the PC, Ko concluded, “This tells us the experience isn’t cannibalizing but complementing the PC experience.” We found this statement curious.
First, why the tremendous effort being poured into making mobile apps? To make the app experience in many ways preferable to the PC?
Second, for many people, as we’ve heard from many Embee Mobile customers, the phone is their lifeline. It’s also for many increasingly the main means of accessing information. Maybe not for productivity (yet). But why take minutes to boot up my laptop to check the weather, when I can quickly do so on my phone?
And with mobile broadband growth being driven in part by strong smartphone sales in 2009, it’s not difficult to see how the mobile phone is not just complementing PCs, but in fact replacing them.
As we’ve said before, we know how important mobile phones are to people, as well as how they want more value from their mobile services. So will consumers go for higher prices for an increasingly commoditized product? Or fire up the PC instead of checking Yelp’s mobile app for the best local Chinese? One could argue the jury is still out, but looking even in the near future, it’s not difficult to see that these leaders are at odds with important industry trends.
Tags: CTIA, embee mobile, mobile, prepaid mobile, San Diego, wireless
