Andrew joins the old telecoms measure of arpu as significant, which it is not. Arpu is a useless measure. What matters is profit per dollar invested, not revenue per user. To get arpu increasing, all they have to do is kick off the low paying customers and keep those who will pay more for the service.
They could keep doing that until they have one customer with an arpu of $10,000 per month. They would have the best arpu on Earth and they would not be in business for long.
Another company might have 5 billion subscribers with an arpu of $1 a year. It's a good bet that the $1 arpu per year company would be doing better than the $10,000 arpu per month company. Arpu is one of the dopiest ideas I have seen. But they all seem to go on about it.
<In the meantime, 3G networks will continue to be expanded, not only in the United States, but everywhere in the world. Second-generation networks will not go away any time soon. For the most part, they are paid for, and their coverage is still better than 3G networks in most parts of the world. > Being "paid for" isn't a factor in whether a technology is obsolete or not. All that matters is whether a new technology can be brought in by a competitor and do better than the incumbents. 2GHz 3G is too expensive for regular humans. That's why it isn't used.
Andrew goes on about finding the secret sauce single application which will get people onto the 3G bandwagon. All that's needed is for the people running the thing to open a big fat low cost pipe and get out of the way.
I don't use 3G. I would like to have 3G available, but the greedy service providers want $1 a megabyte on an arpu-increasing minium usage, use it or lose it, "plan". Telecom wants $8 a megabyte for casual users. They are insane. Normal humans won't pay that. Vodafone isn't much better. I don't have a "plan" at petrol stations. I ride my little motor scooter into whichever I like once a month or once a year and buy $5 or so. I don't have to buy $80 a month whether I want it or not. Nor do I buy petrol by the minute - I buy it by the litre. I don't pull in and say "I'll have 3 minutes of petrol please". I pay for what I take delivery of.
Zenbu, an amazing new wireless service in New Zealand charges only 10c a megabyte and there is no "plan". http;//www.Zenbu.net.nz People buy the amount of credit they want [$5 minimum] and use it when they like. They can use 1c a month or 1c a year. I don't even know what the arpu is. Mostly people buy a $10 credit. But some buy $15, $20 and a few people buy credit in $100 chunks. To some people, $100 is neither here nor there and they don't want to goof around buying credit frequently. They have a big fuel tank on their vehicle and they say "fill 'er up" - they can drive from here to London and back again on a single tank. Others just use the 5 megabyte free credit for a new account.
Telecom has a Wi-Fi service too. They charge $10 an hour for Go-'s sake. So somebody touring NZ decides to check their email to see if Mum has written about Dad's operation. They buy a $10 an hour credit. Damn, there's no email. They fiddle around looking at this and that which they are not really wanting to do because their friends want to get going and checks again at the end of the hour. Still no email. So they have to pay another $10 a few hours later to check again. That's great arpu, and totally rotten service.
Zenbu enables them to check for email for NO charge. 5 megabytes is enough to check for an email. If they want to write an email, and use some megabytes doing this and that, maybe banking, checking accommodation, events, look for ATMs, get a map of where they are, find a BP service station, they can buy $10 credit which doesn't expire, and take all the time they like. They can come back 40 times in the next 3 days waiting for that email and it'll cost them almost nothing. That's very low arpu and totally great service.
The reason Zenbu was started was because Telecom and Vodafone and the service providers around the world have been so greedy that Wi-Fi has become the default technology. Telecom should be able to do it cheaper than Zenbu, but not with wall to wall executives in multi-storey buildings on huge salaries harassing subscribers with arpu-boosting, tricky, confusing and annoying expensive marketing gimmicks costing a fortune on television and in print in costly stores selling phones out of glass cases.
Fire the people, cut the price, open the pipe, make it fast. That's how to get data moving.
All applications are 3G applications. Email included. A millisecond is a millisecond. Our telomeres are wearing out and every millisecond that goes by while we dither is another millisecond down the gurgler. 2G is not good enough.
More telecom oligopoly thinking: <So 2G will stay around for a long time for voice, 3G will be around even longer, first for data and then for data and VoIP, and 4G will be deployed where demand for data is highest and 3G networks are running near capacity. Eventually, 4G systems will take hold and the others will be phased out, but there has to be a return on investment for the network operators, and junking one network for another has to make economic sense. Yes, it costs the network operator less to deliver a kilobyte of data over 3G than over 2G, and it will cost even less on a 4G network that is IP end-to-end, but that is only one reason to move forward as technologies are introduced. >
It is irrelevant whether a network has been profitable, or even had its cost returned. What matters is the best way of doing things. If 4G is a lot better and the 2G and 3G networks have not made money, too bad. They are obsolete. If there's a competitor, they won't care whether the greedy incumbents have made money on their legacy networks. Zenbu doesn't care that Telecom's Wi-Fi and EV-DO systems have not made profits. We care about Happy Customers.
OFDM in 450MHz looks like a good bet. A LOT better than 3G in 2GHz.
3G is easy. Open the pipes, make it cheap, get out of the way. Forget about arpu. Don't even measure it.
Mqurice |
