Taming the Mobile Beast – Part 1: The Challenge of Increased Usage

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At ERA, we believe the category experts we work with are the best in the business. They have a remarkable wealth of knowledge and experience.

Our telecommunications experts recently produced a white paper that shares some of this knowledge (as well as research from The Aberdeen Group, the Canadian Wireless Telecommunications Association, and more than 3,200 mobile-user years of data from their own customers).

This article is the first in our serialization of this white paper on wireless telecommunications…

 

The Challenge of Increased Usage

Wireless revenues are today the largest single component (41%) of telecommunications service providers’ revenues. The demand for wireless services continues to increase; in the business arena, wireless costs are a significant and growing portion of organizations’ overall telecommunications expenditures.

Usage is increasing steadily on all fronts, including airtime minutes, data downloads, text messages and mobile Internet browsing.

Why has the use of mobile devices increased?

In business, a variety of factors is leading to increased use of mobile services and devices and, of course, greater associated costs:

• More employees have mobile devices – cellular phones, Blackberry devices, iPhones and tablets are becoming standard business tools

• Use of airtime minutes per user has quadrupled when compared to 2006 data. We expect this trend to level off or even reverse itself somewhat in the near future with the increased use of non-voice mobile services such as text messaging

• Data usage (for services such as Internet browsing) has skyrocketed from barely measurable in 2006 to sometimes hundreds of Megabytes per month and even Gigabytes per user. We do not expect this trend to level off in the foreseeable future because:
  • Wireless devices are increasingly “data friendly” as the result of larger screen sizes and increased processing power
  • Service providers are upgrading networks because data usage is highly profitable
  • A small proportion of users account for a large proportion of data transfers. More users will mean more data transfers

• The use of text messaging is increasing exponentially over time
• Socialization of business services: social networks, Twitter and video can be used legitimately to accomplish business tasks
• Fixed location wireless connectivity is slowly becoming more popular. Using “turbo hub,” locations can instantly be provided with phone and data services at relatively low cost
• Certain users require more horsepower to display and process data than is currently provided by handheld mobile devices. As people demand mobility, we are seeing wireless modems often provided to users in addition to a handheld device
• As the capabilities of mobile devices become more and more impressive, so the use of non-business services is increasing steadily

What challenges does this present to business?

Given the explosion in mobile usage within business, and as more employees use company-issued mobile devices, telecommunications managers and finance departments are struggling with new challenges:

• Operational management: the time and complexity of managing many devices and the services delivered to them is increasing rapidly

• Cost management: with a greater number of wireless services now being used by employees, it is becoming harder to understand complicated service provider contracts, to match those contracts to a business’s needs, and to isolate business-use wireless charges

• An abundance of opinions: it’s difficult to make the changes and set the standards that are best for the business because users become emotionally attached to their mobile devices and IT/Procurement teams tend to become attached to existing service providers

You can overcome these challenges. The remainder of this series of articles focusing on mobile telecommunications looks more closely at challenges you might face and practical solutions to them.