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U.S. Mobile Penetration Hits 101%

U.S. mobile penetration has hit 101 percent, meaning there are more mobile devices in use than there are people in the United States, according to the latest tally from CTIA-The Mobile Association. Among the headline findings: There are some 321.7 million U.S. mobile subscriber connections, representing 101 percent penetration. In June 2012 there…

OTT App Providers, Telcos and Cable "Think Different" About "Out of Region" Sales

It is no secret that app providers and telecom, mobile, satellite and cable service providers "think different" about their respective "customer" bases and prospects. All access providers necessarily must work within frameworks set by regulators on a country by country, state by state or locality by locality basis.   There are franchises…

“Unlimited” or Shared Data Plans Mostly are Marketing Platforms, at the Moment

The overwhelming majority of customers on AT&T, Sprint, T-Mobile and Verizon networks studied by NPD Connected Intelligence don't even use 2 GBytes worth of mobile data per month, which suggests most consumers do not need “unlimited” service plans. For that matter, the new Verizon Wireless "Share Everything" plans seem unlikely to have…

Worldwide Mobile Data Traffic to Surpass 107 Exabytes in 2017, Says ABI Research

A new forecast from ABI Research shows that the global volume of mobile data traffic could exceed 107 Exabytes in 2017. According to the research firm, this total traffic volume will be eight times more than what is expected for 2012. Although the numbers may sound huge, they shouldn’t be understood as yet another warning of the untamable data…

Global Shift to 'Value' in Communications is Coming

According to industry revenue trends, many developed country markets illustrate the importance of new revenue sources, and might also indirectly point to changing consumer demand profiles. U.K. service provider revenue, for example, has been largely flat since about 2006. Other tier-one service providers in Europe have seen revenue declines…

Data will be 65% of Total U.S. Mobile Revenue by 2016

Data revenue will grow to 65 percent of total U.S. wireless service revenue as voice declines to 35 percent in 2016, according to Hugues de la Vergne, principal research analyst at Gartner.What might not yet be so clear is how the industry will get to that point. Growing adoption of smart phones, with the new and significant data plan revenue, will…

SIP Trunking Set to Explode

Try beating a growth rate of 770 percent over the next five years. That’s the expected global growth rate of Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) trunking over the next five years, according to a recent article by Hamid Qayyum, VP of MSO Sales at Metaswitch. SIP trunking, which delivers Voice-over-IP (VoIP) and streaming media services to customers…

Wireless Users Shifting Away From Contracts to Prepaid

According to new data recently crunched by consultant Chetan Sharma, there's a notable shift among United States consumers away from two-year contract wireless plans -- and toward more cost-friendly prepaid options. According to Sharma, the top seven wireless carriers in the United States lost 52,000 postpaid customers last quarter, the first such…

Carriers to replace buckets of minutes with unlimited calling

The nations' Tier 1 carriers are increasingly toying with the idea of getting rid of options that allow customers to have tiered voice minute packages in favor of a flat rate for unlimited calling, according to a report in the Wall Street Journal. Although no concrete plans have been introduced, and the carriers have not said when they might make…

Mobile Signaling Load Growing Faster than Bearer Traffic

While data traffic is growing, signaling traffic is outpacing actual mobile data traffic by 30 to 50 percent, if not higher, 4G Americas says. Mobile network engineers began encountering that problem some years ago, when investigating cases of congestion on cell sites that seemed not to be experiencing especially-heavy demand. As it turned out…