3G video: operators must get the picture

date: 22nd February 2001, source by: Total Telecom

Motorola and Nokia may be rivals in the mobile handset market, but when it comes to 3G applications, they're in agreement about video and multimedia messaging being the biggest money-spinner for operators.

Motorola's vice president and general manager of 3G products John Thode told mentioned on Thursday at the 3GSM Congress the potential increase in revenue to operators from basic services like voice on top of video was big.

"A lot of other services will piggy-back video, although we think as a straightforward one-to-one real-time service, video is not something that will be very popular," he said. "It'll eat up a lot of bandwidth and the quality of service model is very expensive in terms of pence per minute. But as an enabler of other things, it'll take off when users start adding [video] clips to SMS."

And apparently, 3G handsets which can handle video will be available within 18 months, although the initial high retail price won't be prohibitive.

"Even if they sell for US$800 or US$1000, operators still think they have an extremely valuable 3G business case, and DoCoMo in particular has learnt how to increase average revenue per user (ARPU) considerably," said Thode.

Increasing ARPU may be a black art being perfected in the East, but according to Thode, it's something which operators in valuable geographic MMS markets will have to cotton-on to quickly to pay for 3G networks which can cope with video.

"MMS is definitely a direction in Europe for operators to improve their business cases, and video is key to that, but it's not something which can be done even on a 2.5G network today," he said.

top