Thursday 29 August 2013

A breath of fresh 4G air


Today was a "historic" day for 4G in the UK. After almost 11 months of 4G monopoly by EE, two more operators, O2 and Vodafone, launched 4G services. But considering their tariffs are high and their coverage is poor, that is not what I wanted to talk about.

What drew my attention today is the announcement from Three UK, the smallest of the 4 operators and the undisputed disruptor in the otherwise stale UK market that described the terms of their 4G offering due in December this year.

I quote "..Every customer with a 4G ready device will get a 4G upgrade at no extra cost, with no need to go to a store, no need for a new contract, Sim or tariff change. The All You Can Eat data offering will still be available on 4G".

Now, that is the way to launch 4G in my opinion. Why spend millions upgrading your network to 4G only to then apply such high tariffs that nobody uses it? In today's smartphone world every operators 3G network is heavily overloaded so it makes perfect sense to me to offer 4G as an extension to someones data contract and not charge extra for it. That means you are getting a return of investment and you are also improving the customer experience on 3G by offloading data traffic from it and thus reducing churn.

Saturday 17 August 2013

LTE contracts by vendor

A few days ago I came across an interesting article that lists the proportion of LTE contracts awarded by vendor worldwide (as of August 2013). The source is Informa Telecoms & Media and according to them the data has been verified by the vendors themselves.

Clearly two companies, Chinese Huawei and Swedish Ericsson dominate the market with Huawei at a slight advantage. Third is NSN followed by "Other" which inlcudes Samsung, Alcatel Lucent and ZTE. Of these Samsung and ZTE can be considered developing, while Alcatel Lucent seems a shadow of its former self.

I guess what this article fails to mention is the scale of these contracts. From that perspective Ericsson would definitely be ahead as it has secured big contracts in the US, Korea & Japan where the vast majority of LTE users and traffic is today (approx 85% according to some recent stats published by the GSMA). Huawei on the other hand is pretty much banned from the US so that doesn't help either.

The full article can be found here