Oz MobileNet

Well done Telstra with the extra capacity for the City to Surf on Sunday. With 70,000 participating plus support teams and volunteers the normal mobile capacity at the finish at Bondi is really tested.

Some of the 70,000 participants at Bondi

Telstra took the trouble to roll out a Cell on Wheels right on the beach promenade. This made it possible for its customers to get in contact after the race and even to email photos like the one to the left of the CoW. I observed first hand the frustration of some folks (not on the Telstra network) trying to link up with their family at the conclusion of the race. They gave up after multiple call attempts.

Number of networks using various LTE bands

The Global Mobile Suppliers Association GSA reports that there are now  200 LTE networks launched in 76 countries . This is an increase of 112% in the past year.

Of the 200 networks 182 are LTE FDD including Tesltra and Vodafone 9 are TDD only and 9 have a mix of FDD and TDD which now includes Optus. GSA says that 443 operators are investing in LTE in 130 countries.

1800 MHz (Band 3)  is the most popular band largely because, like Australia, many operators already licensed this band for GSM and used it alongside 900MHz to provide capacity in high density areas. As GSM traffic has reduced due to customers moving to 3G the capacity of the 1800MHz GSM overlay is not needed allow for the refarming of the spectrum. The next most popular band is 2600MHz (Band 7) which was very early on designated for 4G LTE and has been newly licensed. This Band 7 will be used by Telstra and Vodafone in Australia from 2014.

Telstra’s announcement yesterday of its growth of 1.3 million mobile services gives it 15.1 million mobile subscriptions and 49% market share. This is Telstra’s highest market share this century. Telstra has gained share largely at the expense of Vodafone and its fall from favour due to its much publicised network and service issues.

It will be interesting to see the effect on performance of the extensive network upgrade which Vodafone is undertaking. Their noses must be well and truly to the grindstone in Vodafone network land with actions like:

• Change-out of its radio access equipment with Huawei Single RAN kit
• Introduction of an 850 MHz low band HSPA channel on its 3G network to improve capacity and coverage
• The roll-out of 4G LTE 1800MHz to boost network peak speeds
• Addition of lots of new base stations helped by the May 2012 Optus base station sharing deal
• Inclusion of base stations in their network resulting from the closure of the 3GIS Hutchison/Telstra shared network
• Implementation of roaming onto Optus’ network to boost coverage in remote areas 

Vodafone announced this month the turning on of 1,200 new base stations in regional areas across Australia indicating their $1Bn program is getting traction.

Telstra will need to keep its pedal to the metal to keep its network growing to match the growth in the whole mobile data market as well as the growth in its share. Telstra’s CEO recently mentioned ongoing 40% YoY growth in mobile data volumes. This level of growth has been experienced for some years.

Just released IDC data on market share of smartphone and tablets by operating system shows that Android continues to stretch its lead over iOS. Windows Phone is gaining but from a low position.  Blackberry is losing phone share rapidly and as Symbian is basically phased out it looks ever more like a three horse race in the rapidly growing (51% YoY) smartphone market.

According to IDC information smartphones comprised 54.6% of the 432 million phones shipped in 2Q. Interesting that Telstra’s CEO David Thodey said at Mobile Asia Expo in July 2013 that 72% of phones in use in Australia were smartphones which must be high by world standards.

Samsung remains the largest smartphone vendor in 2Q 2013 at 30% however both it and Apple’s share has fallen YoY as lower priced units begin to take share. Nokia and Blackberry are in the Others category.

The Gartner data graph right shows the huge turn around in mobile O/S share since 2018.

Nokia, which dominated the market until iOS and Android came along, had a market capitalisation the same as Apple in 2007 (circa $110Bn). Now Nokia has been sold to Microsoft for $7.2Bn and Apple’s market cap at $413 is the largest in the world (just ahead of Exxon) having peaked at $650Bn in August 2012.

It sure shows how the time distance between rooster and feather duster is getting very short.

Samuel Langhorne Clemens 1835 – 1910

“The reports of my death have been greatly exaggerated.” Samuel Langhorne Clemens: Mark Twain

The wisdom is that SMS is dead or dying due to Over the Top messaging players like WhatsApp, Viber, BlackBerry Messenger, Apple iMessage and Facebook Messenger. Well SMS might be a simple service massively overpriced considering its cost of production but dead or dying it is not. Industry source Portio’s founder and MD Karl Whitfield claims that world SMS revenues are going up and will top $133 billion in 2013. He says:

Since the early days of SMS in the 1990s to today, in mid-2013, SMS revenue worldwide has gone UP every single year. So far, the operator community has not “lost” anything. From 2013 to 2017 inclusive, SMS revenue worldwide will remain above 2010 levels, hardly an industry ravaged by new threats and killer competition. SMS will continue to generate over USD 100 billion per annum for at least the next five years.

In Australia ACMA reports that 36 billion SMS’s were sent in the year to June 2011 up 23% form the previous year while Telstra says SMS’s on its network have gone from 1 billion to 12 billion between 2002 and 2012.

An SMS comprises a maximum of 1,120 bits so if data were charged at the current SMS rate of 25 cents then 1GB of data which is typically provided on smartphone plans today for around $10 would cost $1.8M. It makes international roaming data charges of typically 1.5c per KB or $15,000 per GB look like a bargain.

Motorola’s latest phone Moto X

Motorola and the world’s first mobile phone DynaTAC

Moto X is the latest attempt by Motorola under Google’s ownership to resurect its former position of greatness in mobile phone products.

Those of us who are long of tooth still have memories of the mighty Motorola as the innovator and maker of the first practical mobiles the DynaTAC’s. They shifted the goal posts later on with MicroTAC AMPS and early GSM phones which showed the world how good a compact flip phone could be.

Apart from a few flashes of brilliance like the original RAZR phones in the mid 2000′s Motorola seem to have lost their way. With their purchase by Google for $12.5Bn in mid 2011 Motorola has been set on a course of reform aimed at restoring its past glory while contributing more than just circa $6Bn worth of Intellectual Property Rights to Google.

The Moto X needless to say is a pure Android phone. It has some quite innovative product and sales features and low and behold is being made in Texas USA.There is a full run down on the Moto X and some of the backgroud leading to its creation on Wired web site here. The full specs of the new phone are on GSM Arena here.

You could wish Motorola good luck with their venture but as others like Research in Motion/Blackberry and Nokia are finding it is a hard road back to fame in the mobile phone business.