Flat Rate Pricing

Smartphones and Tablets have crossed an inflection point, with numbers overtaking Desktop and Notebook PCs

 Mobile Internet Devices with higher processing power and access speeds have higher data consumption

 Content sharing among digital consumers is on the rise

 Globally, video streaming grew by 97%, while VOIP/IM grew

by 84% in H1 2010

 Several consumer-cloud services available on the mobile platform have been launched

 Apple's iCloud, Google cloud applications and Microsoft's Skydrive will all increase data transfer volumes over MBB

 Worldwide M2M modules will reach 210 million units shipment by 2015 as the push for 'digitalization' continues

 Data consumption of M2M modules is als

Although the opportunity for telcos in mobile broadband looks promising, rapidly increasing mobile data traffic does raise some concern. The increase in mobile data traffic is being seen across geographies: Telecom Italia delivered 15 times more mobile data traffic in 2010 compared to 2007; AT&T reported traffic jump- ing by a factor of 30 from Q3 2009 to Q3 2010; while China Unicom's 3G services saw a 62% traffic increase in Q2 2010 alone.3 In the UK, the volume of mobile data transferred over the mobile networks has increased 40-fold over the last three years.4 Worldwide mobile data traffic is forecasted to grow at 108% per year to reach 3.6 Exabytes per month by 2015.5

However, increasing mobile data traffic has not resulted in an equal increase in revenues, as mobile operators in developed markets make only a third of their revenue from data traffic which is three-quarters of their total network traffic6 (see Figure 2). However, these forecasts are based on current business models and pricing assumptions which telcos can change to monetize the demand for mobile broadband.

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