Mobile service revenue increased 0.58 percent in Q1 2014 to $264 billion, said ABI Research.
The telecom research agency predicts that the total service revenue for 2014 will grow 2.9 percent to $1.01 trillion, mainly driven by the mobile Internet market – 2G, 3G and 4G LTE.
Two important aspects — mobile data subscriptions and enhanced network capacity will drive mobile Internet service revenue to $456.7 billion by 2019 — 44.7 percent of total mobile service revenue.
Despite global service revenue growth, the Western European service revenue declined 5.2 percent in Q1 2014. Recently, GSMA called for action to revive the market.
European telecom carriers are facing continued price pressure driven by the competitive mobile market. Telecoms such as Vodafone, Telefonica, T-Mobile, and Orange have suffered from gross profit decreases in Q1 2014. On the other hand, North America mobile carriers are showing positive outlook for gross profit.
Verizon Wireless beat China Mobile for the first time, carrying the top position for most profitable mobile carrier in aggregate for Q1 2014, followed by China Mobile and AT&T respectively. China Mobile and its rivals are facing significant challenges from OTT players.
Verizon benefitted from strong growth in retail postpaid subscribers, increased smartphone customer base, enhanced 4G LTE smartphone line-up, and attractive pricing plans to show improved profit. In addition, Verizon also moved up one position to second in the ranking for quarterly gross profit per subscriber, at $77.1.
Japan and South Korea mobile operators expect monthly data traffic per wireless subscriber will reach 12 Gigabytes in 2019. These two countries are investing in 4G LTE.
Global mobile data traffic will reach 260.8 Exabytes by 2019, nearly a six-fold increase on 2014, said ABI Research.
On Thursday, ABI Research said the installed base of active wireless connected devices will exceed 16 billion in 2014, about 20 percent more than in 2013. The number of devices will more than double from the current level, with 40.9 billion forecasted for 2020.
Internet of Things (IoT) will be the driving force behind the surge in connections.
Smartphones, PCs, and other hub devices represent 44 percent of the active total this year, but by end-2020 their share is set to drop to 32 percent.
75 percent of the growth between today and the end of the decade will come from non-hub devices: sensor nodes and accessories.
Meanwhile, Berg Insight today said the global cellular M2M market has entered a period of transition from 2G to 3G/4G technologies. The share of cellular M2M devices connected to HSPA/LTE networks is projected to more than double from less than 20 percent at the end of 2014 to more than 50 percent by 2018.
3G/4G is expected to overtake 2G already in 2017. HSPA will be the largest technology in an intermittent period until the current price gap to LTE has been closed.
The main catalyst for the anticipated acceleration of 3G/4G adoption over the next years will be the growing data requirements of many M2M applications.
Baburajan K
[email protected]
