Business models for deployment and operation of femtocell networks; - Are new cooperation strategies needed for mobile operators?

In this paper we discuss different business models for deployment and operation of femtocell networks intended for provisioning of public mobile broad band access services. In these types of business cases the operators use femtocells in order to reduce investments in "more costly" macro networks since the traffic can be "offloaded" to "less costly" femtocell networks. This is in contrast to the many business cases presented in Femtoforum where femtocells mainly are discussed as a solution to improve indoor coverage for voice services in homes and small offices, usually for closed user groups The main question discussed in this paper is if "operators need to consider new forms of cooperation strategies in order to enable large scale deployment of femtocells for public access?" By looking into existing solutions for indoor wireless access services we claim that the answer is both "Yes" and "No". No, since many types of cooperation are already in place for indoor deployment. Yes, because mobile operators need to re-think the femtocell specific business models, from approaches based on singe operator networks to different forms of cooperation involving multi-operator solutions, e.g. roaming and network sharing. --

Change of Market Structure for Mobile Payments Services in Sweden - The Case of SMS Tickets

Mobile operators and mobile service providers like SMS aggregators and ticket providers have until now been the main actors in the provisioning of SMS tickets for public transportation services. The consumers have been charged for SMS payments using the mobile phone bill. Due to financial regulation (EU directive) mobile operators are no longer allowed to handle payments and transactions for non-telecom services without being a payment provider implying registration of the customers. In Sweden the mobile operators have joined forces and formed a joint venture that offers a separate charging solution, i.e. not using the phone bill. However, this new joint venture has in most cases not been involved in the public procurement of new ticket and payment solutions initiated 2012 by the Swedish transport companies. The outcome is that a number of new actors and constellations have entered the mobile payment business. In the paper the change of the market structure for SMS payment services in Sweden is analysed. The motivation for the research is to contribute to the understanding why mobile payment services do not take off on a large scale in Sweden although the technology and solutions are here. The case with the transformation of the SMS payment market provides insights about some of the barriers. There is no common national SMS payment solution. Users have to register accounts with a number of different payment providers. The registration process is an obstacle, the SMS payments have decreased with 50 – 90% compared to the same period 2012. We can see a fragmentation of the Swedish mobile payment service market. Due to the multitude of different solutions the incentives for both consumers and merchants to extend these payment solutions to other areas would be low

Valuation of spectrum for mobile broadband services: Engineering value versus willingness to pay

Radio spectrum is a vital asset and resource for mobile network operators. With spectrum in the 800 and 900 MHz bands coverage can be provided with fewer base station sites compared to higher frequency bands like 2.1 and 2.6 GHz. With more spectrum, i.e. wider bandwidth, operators can offer higher capacity and data rates. Larger bandwidths means that capacity can be provided with fewer base station sites, i.e. with lower cost. Operators that acquire more spectrum in existing or new bands can re-use existing sites for capacity build out. Engineering value is one way to estimate the marginal value of spectrum. The calculation of engineering value is based on comparison of different network deployment options using different amounts of spectrum. This paper compare estimates of engineering value of spectrum with prices paid at a number of spectrum auctions, with a focus on Sweden. A main finding is that estimated engineering value of spectrum is much higher than prices operators have paid at spectrum auctions during the last couple of years. The analysis also includes a discussion of drivers that determine the willingness to pay for spectrum.Radio spectrum,mobile communications,spectrum valuation,spectrum allocation,mobile broadband,marginal value of spectrum,engineering value

Business Innovation Strategies to Reduce the Revenue Gap for Wireless Broadband Services

Mobile broadband is increasing rapidly both when it comes to traffic and number of subscriptions. The swift growth of the demand will require substantial capacity expansions. Operators are challenged by the fact that revenues from mobile broadband are limited, just a few per cent of APRU, and thus not compensating for declining voice revenues, creating a so called "revenue gap". Concurrently, mobile broadband dominates the traffic, set to grow strongly. In this paper we analyze the potential of different strategies for operators to reduce or bridge the revenue gap. The main options are to reduce network costs, to increase access prices and to exploit new revenue streams. The focus in the paper is on cost & capacity challenges and solutions in the network domain. Operators can cooperate and share sites and spectrum, which could be combined with off-loading heavy traffic to less costly local networks. In the network analysis we illustrate the cost impacts of different levels of demand, re-use of existing base station sites, sharing of base stations and spectrum and deployment of a denser network. A sensitivity analysis illustrates the impact on total revenues if access prices are increased, whether new types of services generate additional revenues, and if it fills the revenue gap. Our conclusion is that the different technical options to reduce the revenue gap can be linked to business strategies that include cooperation with both other operators as well as with non-telecom actors. Hence, innovations in the business domain enable technical solutions to be better or fully exploited.Wireless Internet access, data traffic, revenues, network costs, spectrum, deployment strategies, HSPA, LTE, operator cooperation, value added services, NFC, B2B2C.

Analysis of roles and position of mobile network operators in mobile payment infrastructure

A number of different mobile payment solutions have been presented the last decade. The phone subscription with its security mechanisms are used for user identification and payments. This is the case for SMS based payment and ticketing systems that are getting more and more popular. However, there are other ways to implement a Trusted Element (TE) , where a SIM card architecture is only one. It can be in the mobile phone, as a separate integrated circuit, as an optional customer deployed plug-in device (e.g., microSD) or be running as an application on a server existing entirely as software. In this paper we analyze what roles and responsibilities different actors have in different types of mobile payments solutions. The main focus is on the implications for the mobile operator business. It turns out that new types of intermediary actors in most cases play an important role. Sometimes mobile operators are not even involved. The emergence of new payment together with other non-SIM card based TE solutions opens up for many different market scenarios for mobile payment services. --

Mobile Broadband Expansion Calls for More Spectrum or Base Stations - Analysis of the Value of Spectrum and the Role of Spectrum Aggregation

The breakthrough for mobile broadband is taking the mobile communications industry into a new phase. The number of mobile broadband users in the world exceeds 400 million, and the share of the population in Western Europe with mobile broadband is around 10 per cent and over 15 percent in Austria and Sweden. This development has been propelled by the extensive diffusion of mobile modems (dongles) for laptops and smartphones given users ubiquitous access to mobile internet. Consequently, traffic volumes in the mobile networks have grown immensely, and the mobile data traffic surpassed the mobile voice traffic in the world by the end of 2009, and in for example Sweden, over 75 percent of the mobile traffic is data. --

Can mobile eco-systems for technical innovations be standardized? The case of mobile wallets and contactless communication

This paper puts focus on the application of Near Field Communication technology (NFC) to mobile payments. Uncertainties about global policies open for a variety of local business policies. Taking into account different representations of actor interaction as described by different eco-systems by different policy forums the main research question to be discussed in the paper is: Can policies or standards describing actor roles and responsibilities for technical innovations like mobile payments remove obstacles for introduction of the innovation? Different types of industry forums are not only involved in strictly technical matters but also discuss and describe visions about how a new technique might be applied in business life. They suggest different business architectures, (not only a technical architecture), where roles of different type of actors and relations between actors are outlined based on ideas about so called eco-systems. Against this background the paper first discusses how NFC enabled mobile payments currently attracts a lot of attention and identifies four possible development paths making it happen. The paper discusses and compares how global policy networks describe the technical and business architectures for mobile payments. The paper uses a business practice analytical framework and an industrial network framework to identify major problems in connecting global and local policies. Some comments on further research finalize the paper. --Near Field Communication,mobile payments,global policy,business architecture,policy forum,industrial networks,practice

The Role of Mobile Network Operators in Intelligent Transport Systems: Situation Analysis, Challenges and Suggested Approach

In recent years, the role of Information and Communications Technology (ICT) in automotive has been accentuated, as services requiring vehicle-to-infrastructure (“V2I”) networks to communicate with off-board software have been multiplying. While current legislation, policies and network infrastructure generally limit such off-board services to infotainment (for example in-vehicle hotspots for media streaming, web browsing from passenger mobile devices) for safety and security reasons, many industry analysts but also the research community predict that the automotive landscape of 2025 will be different. Next generation mobile networks are expected to provide the necessary quality of service (e.g. low latency, high throughput) to support a broad range of applications, from infotainment to mission-critical telematic applications that involve partial or full remote vehicle control. At the same time, such mission-critical applications have already started to appear as Proof-of-Concepts (PoCs), in controlled environments (for example controlled sections of highways, or test tracks). In this paper, we investigate the role of Mobile Network Operators (MNOs) in such applications. The paper starts from an overview of the current status of automotive/ICT industry from a market, policy and technology perspective. Subsequently, we present results from a study of two use cases performed within Ericsson Research. The authors use learnings from these use cases and the current industry status to form a general understanding on the challenges that MNOs will face as network infrastructure providers for automotive applications, as well as strategic options for MNOs to address these challenges

Business models for deployment and operation of femtocell networks; - Are new cooperation strategies needed for mobile operators?

In this paper we discuss different business models for deployment and operation of femtocell networks intended for provisioning of public mobile broad band access services. In these types of business cases the operators use femtocells in order to reduce investments in "more costly" macro networks since the traffic can be "offloaded" to "less costly" femtocell networks. This is in contrast to the many business cases presented in Femtoforum where femtocells mainly are discussed as a solution to improve indoor coverage for voice services in homes and small offices, usually for closed user groups The main question discussed in this paper is if "operators need to consider new forms of cooperation strategies in order to enable large scale deployment of femtocells for public access?" By looking into existing solutions for indoor wireless access services we claim that the answer is both "Yes" and "No". No, since many types of cooperation are already in place for indoor deployment. Yes, because mobile operators need to re-think the femtocell specific business models, from approaches based on singe operator networks to different forms of cooperation involving multi-operator solutions, e.g. roaming and network sharing

On co-opetition between mobile network operators: Why and how competitors cooperate

This paper address issues about cooperation among and competition between mobile network operators. The starting point is to examine why and how operators share infrastructure for mobile communication services, so called network sharing. The paper analyzes drivers, benefits and obstacles of network cooperation. We also analyze how roles and responsibilities are distributed for the network related functions while concurrently operators compete for customers and have separate functionality for service provisioning, marketing, customer relation management, charging and billing. Next, we analyze how network sharing as such and strategies for network sharing have changed in Sweden from the year 2000 when the 3G licenses were awarded and up to the year 2010. Moreover, network sharing in Sweden is compared with India where the market situation is different, as the number of operators is four times more and the cooperation is organized in another way, with separate tower companies, which provides base stations sites where operators are tenants. Finally, we compare the network sharing cases with how mobile operators organize cooperation for mobile payments services. From our empirical data we can identify four different types of co-opetition among mobile operators. 1. A co-operative spirit with focus on working practices and/or principles that will facilitate the common use of resources or solutions. 2. Infrastructure cooperation through a third party, e.g. a tower company or a SMS aggregator with the main objective to reduce costs or to provide a common solution. The operators have agreements with a third party but not with each other. 3. Infrastructure cooperation through a joint venture that is responsible for network deployment and operation. The driver is to achieve cost-savings. The operators have their own service provisioning, billing, customer relations management and compete for end-users. 4. Service and infrastructure cooperation through a joint venture that is fully responsible for providing the end-user service, in our case mobile payments. The main driver is to offer a payment solution common for all operators in order to complement or compete with solutions provided by banks or payment service providers