Revenue requirements for mobile operators with ultra-high mobile broadband data traffic growth.

Mobile broadband data access over cellular networks has been established as a major new service in just a few years. The mobile broadband penetration has risen from almost zero to between 10 and 15 per cent in Western European leading markets from 2007 to the end of 2009. More than 75% of network traffic was broadband data in 2009, and the data volumes are growing rapidly. But the revenue generation is the reverse as the average for operators in Europe in 2009 was around 77 per cent of service revenues from voice, 10 per cent from SMS and 13 per cent from other data. Voice and broadband data service are built on two quite different business models. Voice pricing is volume based. Revenue depends linearly on the number of voice minutes. Broadband data service on the other hand is mainly flat fee based even if different levels are being introduced as well as tiers. Revenue is decoupled from traffic and therefore also from operating costs and investment requirements. This is what we define as a revenue gap. Earnings as well as internal financing will suffer from increasing traffic per user unless the flat fee can be raised or changed to volume based, other revenue can be obtained and/or operating costs and investments can be reduced accordingly. Observable trends and common forecasts indicate strong growth of mobile broadband traffic as well as declining revenue from mobile voice in the next five year period. This outlook suggests a prospective revenue gap with weak top-line growth and expanding operating costs and investment requirements. This is not only a profitability and cash flow issue. It may also severely restrict the industry's revenue and profit growth potential if it is handled mainly by cost-cutting. In sections 2 - 4 we describe related work, our contribution, the specific research questions as well as the methodology and its problems. Section 5 is an overview of mobile operators' revenue, its sources and development till today. Section 6 presents trends, developments and published forecasts that may be relevant for the future. Section 7 contains our conclusions. --Mobile broadband,mobile operator revenues,revenue requirements,voice revenues,non-voice revenues

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. --

Supply-Push or Demand-Pull as Driver for Local Access Provisioning? - Initial Findings from Interviews with Market Actors

This paper analyzes push-pull initiatives of technological development by studying the concept of Novel Access Provisioning of new wireless Internet access to existing backbone infrastructure. The Novel Access Provisioning project is conducted within the Swedish techno-economic research project with participants from the Royal Institute of Technology (KTH), Stockholm School of Economics (SSE) and the Swedish Telecom Agency (PTS). This paper reports on the results from a series of interviews during the fall of 2005 with main representatives from within the Telecom Industry and outside in the Nordic market having an interest in the development and use of mobile services. The aim of the paper is to increase the understanding for why some innovations have a rapid rate of adoption while others are deployed more slowly

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.

A. Novel Access Provisioning

ABSTRACT. New ways of increasing cost efficiency and introduction of new services are necessary to promote development of extensive usage of a multitude of high data rate wireless services similar to the Internet. The Novel Access provisioning (NAP) project investigates the possibilities in small scale access and service provisioning as a low cost complement to existing Mobile Networks. New market players and business models are analysed. Private companies, shops etc can act as Local network operators where the company network is “re-used ” for public access. Companies with large customer base, a strong brand and wide spread local presence represent another type of new market player where company assets like marketing, customer support and billing units also can be exploited for operation of mobile networks

Regelbedarfsermittlung für die Grundsicherung: Perspektiven für die Weiterentwicklung

In der Debatte über die Anfang 2017 vorgenommene Neufestsetzung der Sozialleistungen nach dem SGB II und XII kehren viele Themen aus den öffent-lichen Diskussionen vor Einführung des Regelbedarfs-Ermittlungsgesetzes (RBEG) im Jahr 2011 wieder. Entscheidungen über die Höhe dieser Leistungen sind grundsätzlich normativ geprägt. Viele Aspekte des Verfahrens sind aber methodischen Überlegungen zugänglich. Vor diesem Hintergrund diskutiert der Beitrag Möglichkeiten und Grenzen der Regelbedarfsermittlung nach einem “Statistikmodell“ und macht konkrete Vorschläge für wünschenswerte Aktualisierungen und mögliche Weiterentwicklungen. Ziel ist, ein sachgerechtes und konsistenteres System der Regelbedarfe für verschiedene Haushaltsmitglieder zu entwickeln als bisher.   Assessing Social Assistance Benefits: Perspectives for Refining the Current Approach In debates about the recent re-assessment of welfare benefits for job-seekers and other needy individuals, many issues reappear that have been publicly discussed in 2011, when the current legal framework was defined. Basically, decisions regarding the level of these benefits are normative in their nature. But many aspects of the procedures involved can be subjected to methodological considerations. Against this background, the paper discusses options and limitations of assessing welfare benefits relying on a “statistics approach” and suggests a number of up-dates and refinements. The task is to develop a scheme of subsistence-level benefits for households of differing size that is adequate and more consistent than the existing one. JEL–Klassifizierung: C18, D10, D12, H5

Income-dependent equivalence scales

Income inequality and poverty risks receive a lot of attention in public debates and current research. To make income comparable across different types of households, applying the "(modified) OECD scale" – an equivalence scale with fixed weights for each household type – has become a quasi-standard in research. Instead, we derive a base-dependent equivalence scale allowing for scale weights that vary with income, building on micro-data from Germany. Our results suggest that appropriate equivalence scales are much steeper at the lower end of the income distribution than they are for higher income levels. We illustrate our findings by applying them to data on family income differentiated by household types. It turns out that using income-dependent equivalence scales matters for applied research on income inequality, especially if one is concerned with the composition, not just the size of the population at poverty risk