mobile penetration

The mobile operators (MO) worldwide are struggling to grab a bigger pie of the telecom market by a cornucopia of mobile services such as multi-media packages, streamlining their networks, pricing, and indeed meticulous collaborations. We have seen the results.

Analysts have predicted that mobile penetration will cannibalize the landline growth rate tremendously. Infact, it already has been doing that over last few years. Mobile users (like myself) are cutting the cord and leveraging on the anytime/anywhere, user-friendly wireless devices. The ease and fecundity of a mobile service as opposed to the good old landline is self-explanatory. The mobile-2-mobile rates are lower than landline-2-mobile, or any such permutations. Why would a smart, discerning user choose a less feasible proposition and end-up paying steep federal taxes? Have the CLECs, ILECs or the regular telecom operators planned it well?
A projected $110 billion market for the period 2006-07 in North America assures promising mobile growth. The mobile penetration will double by next year to 200 million. Asia-pacific has over a billion mobile users, with the third largest economy, India adding 14 million mobile users within 29 days recently. The 80-network operated economy will witness over 200 million GSM users by 2007; it excludes the CDMA penetration. All that sounds good, but whats the game-plan?
Cut-throat competition and savvier customers engage the service providers in consolidation and a focussed retention strategy to begin with, but a healthier ecosystem can only help customers from getting confused or debilitate their m-cap. Essentially, the ecosystem would consist of a synergy between the service provider and the vendor, who continously educate the customers and offer the desired services. The best technology, 3G/4G roll-outs and immaculately designed services may fail, if the end-user is not satiated. I will discuss this from a different perspective later....