Sunday, June 22, 2008

Will finally carriers detect the PoC opportunities?

After several posts talking about us, new products, mentions, come back to evangelist task :-)
Carriers are worried about still 80% voice and 20% data mobile revenue not being balanced (and even the difference is wider if taking in count SMS is carried to CS - voice domain).
At the same time most markets are mature in terms of subscribers reaching 90-120% market penetration (more than 1 linea per citizen) and the ARPU is being stable around 28-40 € in most western countries.
Some promising technologies as PoC (push over cellular, mainly push-to-talk) have been delayed, shyly launches, or discarded due to voice and sms canibalization fears. Carriers are having a too mucha conservative approach, they are more focused about risk avoidance than boosting new ARPU increasing opportunities.
Please, start seeing PoC as SMS. SMS is not seeing only as mobile to mobile use case, and a lot of mobile to machine (sms to tv-screen, ring-tones download payment, voting, etc) and machine to mobile (alerts, m-banking alerts, marketing, headline news distribution, etc).
Why not using PoC with the same approach with push-to-talk? A lot of mobile to server and server to mobile can be used for raising marketing budgets of companies, increasing the non-final subscribers revenues, and enablig new on subscription based services. Being even more ambitious push-to-talk could be the first step for affordable man-machine interaction to browse news, services, etc, defeating the usability barrier of mid-tier devices (small display, limited keypad).
Hope we can find soon carriers realizing of PoC potential and proactively launching PoC to mass market.

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