Sabato, 10 mag 2003, alle 03:09 Europe/Rome, Juergen Specht ha scritto:
>
>> According to docomo's statistics, only about 15% of traffic is due
>> to mail. Now this is down from 40% several years ago, which may be
>> due to different ways of counting (I won't go into this here).
>
> Following the discussion about traffic and the relation to ADSL
> users etc, I simply must ask: what has traffic to do with usage?
>
> If we just take the numbers above...15% of traffic is mail.
> Does it mean people communicate less? Not at all, it gets more
> and more. But emails are short (by design and by convenience)
> so for the download of one 5kb big wallpaper, I can also send
> easily 100 short emails to 100 different individuals and generate
> Comparing email traffic and usage traffic is like comparing
> apples and bananas.
Apples and bananas are very different. :-)
100% with you, maybe I've put it in the wrong form...
I am sure that an always-on connection increases the
usage of e-mail and web browsing even if the traffic
impact is marginal and those will remain the most used
application as people do communicate more and more.
But this is not the main reason, in the consumer market,
for switching to broadband.
I've been talking with Telecom Italia vicepresident for
the italian network in a conference.
I did not gave me the exact numbers of services usage
and relative traffic but he told me that most of the
upstream traffic increase recorded in 2002 is due
to P2P and this is the real driving factor for users
to open an ADSL line.
The details are not directly given by the Telco operators
as this could generate serious problems with the media
industry. The reality is that ADSL ISPs are very happy
about P2P as it is helping them very much in generating
market demand...
So traffic and usage is different but anyway the bottom
line underlined by Telecom Italia is that e-mail
is not driving broadband adoption. In the same
way maybe also messaging and WAP browsing
could be not driving 3G adoption as GPRS is already
perceived as enough to provide an interesting
user experience for WAP and MMS.
What should we expect? Video messaging?
Music download? Video streaming?
Or maybe something different and unexpected
developed on an open os like Symbian?
In this sense wire lines telco strategies and
mobile network telco strategies looks like they
already diverging.
For example H3G/3 recent market introduction:
Nec e606 has a dual mode (WAP-HTML) capable
browser (This was confirmed me by the developers).
3 has decided to block any connection outside 3
mobile portal. In the same way on this Nec even if you
have 32mb o ram there is no way to run a native
application but just Java. This is clearly a way to
control content access by building a walled
garden with higher walls than DoCoMo's
one. As far as I know power users are not very
happy with this as many GPRS phones like
the 7650, 3650 and P800 offer much more
advanced features than this 3G phone and H3G
is very worried about this....
H3G/3 is going to introduce by fall the new Motorola
A920 a phone that is seen as vital for 3's success
in the business market. But so they will loose any
walled garden as you will be able to use any
Symbian browser or software to access other
content. By this A920s users could end up by
ignoring H3G portal looking for more interesting
content perfectly viewable and accessible by
their handset and also looking for new
applications developed in an independent way
by 3rd parties. A920 is an high end phone for a niche
market but this could prove dangerous with new
Symbian based phones becoming less expensive
and targeted for the low-end market.
So H3G i this case will end up to be a mobile
ISP.
The fact that handset design is not controlled
in EU by operators is an important variable
impacting on the telcos business model.
Vodafone's strategy manager for Italy has told me
in another conference that Microsoft is their
real competitor, something impossible in Japan.
This is very logic as the real battle will be
controlling the user experience, and for telcos
user experience control will be not as easy
as it is in the JP market.
Giovanni
________________________________________
giovanni bertani mobile vas consultant
(giovanni.bertani@exsense.com)
Received on Sat May 10 17:00:45 2003