Mobile internet remains largely unexploited

The market for mobile internet services remains largely untapped, according to industry analysts which claim that operators and service providers could be raking in as much as $66bn per year, instead of the $9.5bn they are taking at present.

Industry analyst the Yankee Group warned that the full extent of the mobile internet services opportunity remains unexploited because service providers and their technology partners are not overcoming barriers to adoption quickly enough.

Crucially, large numbers of consumers are being denied affordable and reliable mobile access to the internet and service providers are missing out on a huge revenue opportunity.

Yankee actually believes that the $66bn figure touted for global consumer mobile internet services is a conservative estimate, because it refers only to access. The researcher claims that it excludes all incremental revenue from the billions of transactions consumers would generate if they had ubiquitous mobile internet access.

“If operators make it a priority to provide accessible, easy-to-use services, and flat-rate price plans they can drive significant additional growth in mobile data usage and ARPU,” said Declan Lonergan, director of the Yankee Group’s Consumer Research group.

“Demand for mobile access to the internet is far greater than has been achieved to date,” he said. “Most future projections are also conservative. This is because success of the mobile internet continues to be restrained by several obstacles that litter the path to our vision of ubiquitous connectivity. The true scale of the social and economic impact that can be achieved by extending mobile internet access to millions of new customers would go far beyond the financial metrics that we have modeled. Consumers, businesses and societies would all benefit in unquantifiable terms.”

Analyst house and telecoms.com parent, Informa Telecoms & Media, recently identified further obstacles to mobile internet service uptake in its report, ‘UK Mobile Content Survey: What Consumers Want’.

Informa said that while the majority of mobile operators are sitting on a wealth of customer meta data, they will not make this information readily available for content providers and advertising agencies intent on getting a share of a market worth £20bn in the UK alone.