Editor’s Note: Welcome to our weekly Reality Check column. We’ve gathered a group of visionaries and veterans in the mobile industry to give their insights into the marketplace.
The global mobile industry is about to reach a major inflection point: Mobile broadband is on the verge of making the transition from a premium service for the affluent to a mass-market service.
Two powerful forces are driving this transition. The first is this: The rapidly falling cost of devices that can connect to HSPA networks, which have been deployed by more than 280 mobile operators worldwide to provide mobile broadband services to their customers.
Prices are now low enough that HSPA phones are crossing the divide between the postpaid market, where the retail price of handsets is often heavily subsidized by mobile operators, and the prepaid market, where subsidies tend to be small or non-existent. This is an important step because more than 70% of the world’s 4 billion plus mobile users have prepaid subscriptions and have to pay the full retail price for their access device.
In the Philippines, for example, Smart sells the Buddy Zip 188 handset in a prepaid kit for just 3,790 pesos ($80), while in the U.K., Brits can now buy an HSPA handset, the INQ Mini 3G, for only
Reality Check: Mobile broadband goes mass-market
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