CANNES, France-Operators and vendors alike expressed a quiet optimism for the upcoming year as the GSM community gathered for its annual global meeting last week in the south of France. The event focused less on when wideband CDMA launches would occur in Europe and more on how, with most GSM players displaying a determined patience that they will have their chance to shine in the third-generation arena.
GSM operators have firmly admitted they are ultimately responsible for their own successes and failures and have made decisions to that end. The GSM Association has been completely revamped, with a new board comprised of top operator executives-including Mohan Gyani, senior strategic executive of AT&T Wireless Services Inc.-from 23 of the leading GSM carriers worldwide, including China Mobile, China Unicom and seven other Asian operators.
The group admitted it must do a better job of addressing what it called “W-CDMA misconceptions” regarding rollout and market information. Rob Conway, the association’s chief executive officer, said the group had become too involved in standardization and would refocus on operator issues, such as interoperability and roaming, although it would still work closely with standards groups.
Establishing business models and return on investment was a key theme throughout the conference. Although operators realize revenues will not increase at exponential rates, some carriers are seeing modest data growth. Neil Montefiore, CEO of Singapore operator MobileOne, said it has seen its mobile nonvoice revenues increase from 3 percent to 13 percent and month-on-month growth of GPRS traffic of about 40 percent.
M1 was one of only a handful of wireless companies that braved the financial markets last year with an initial public offering.
Multimedia messaging service’s ability to contribute to operator profitability was discussed in detail throughout the four-day event. Asian operator CSL Hong Kong touted its MMS success, noting the service has increased traffic to its network and its Web site for downloads. “We love it because we have GPRS usage now,” said Mike Robey, chief operating officer of Hong Kong CSL.
The analyst community was not afraid to rain on the industry parade, however. Lehman Brothers analyst for European telecom equipment Stuart Jeffrey said he has several MMS concerns-pricing, short message service cannibalization, termination rates and content exclusivity.
However, Robey and Laura Rovizzi, director of mobile multimedia services for Italian operator Wind, discounted the SMS cannibalization issue, saying SMS and MMS are two separate applications that actually benefit each other. “People who use MMS use more SMS,” said Robey.
