Role Mobile Carriers could play on the Internet in near future

According to CISCO Visual Networking Index, Mobile Data is growing at 108% YOY from 2009to 2014 Worldwide. This doesn’t mean that mobile operators’ revenue is growing at same rate. According to ABI research mobile data revenue is growing at around 18% CARG in North America. With data usage growing so rapidly carrier’s biggest challenge is falling margins on the data network and are seeking ways to keep their maintain their margins.

Let’s fast-forward five years to 2015. The mobile Internet would become default channel to access the Internet. With my glasses I see two kinds of scenarios (there would a mix of these, just to make it simple, let’s consider these two cases)

(a) Carriers deliver only data

(b) Carriers play a major role in the Mobile internet eco-system.

Scenario (a),

Carriers have invested more into their network capabilities and believe that their business model is charging on data flowing on network and don’t want to get involved mediating their data traffic or have decided to sell their no PII data to some 3^rd party vendor, who sells this data to Ad-networks, publishers and enterprises.

Carriers will have a fast network and huge bandwidth. All the operators would also start dealing with high pricing pressure and/or struggling to maintain their high profit margins. Most of carriers now become like a Big Fat Pipe, just like Electric companies. People really don’t care who the provider of their electricity is, they do care about the fixtures, lights, and gadgets. Consumers wouldn’t really care who their wireless providers is, they would care about their phones, OS and Apps they are using. Everyone would start taking wireless internet connection as basic utility.

Now if operators want to move up the value chain to becomes more relevant to the internet, it becomes really hard for operators as they have been cut-off by their value chain for new from Apple, Google, Microsoft and others players.

Furthermore it would be hard for operators to even sell their data directly as they haven’t built their customer profiles and analytics capabilities, also they now don’t have direct relationships, technology integrations as their 3^rd party vendor have with Ad-Networks, Publishers and Enterprises and have continuously evolved their products over past five years.

Scenario (b)

Mobile operators have invested in their data assets to become more relevant to internet and have realized that their data they are sitting on is goldmine and are changing the internet for good. Major mobile operators built partnership, where they bring customers data together to give complete true insights on what’s happening on the internet without revealing PII information.

Operators truly have the ability to understand what you consume, what your likes, what your friends consume and can provide recommendation on Apps, Contents and Deals making your discovery easy on the internet. Furthermore, ad-networks, enterprises, and publishers are dipping into this no PII data assets to personalize ads, campaigns and deals to better server each profile & segment for higher ROI. With this Operator earns over the top revenues in multiple streams and playing a major role in evolutions of the internet.

Does this sound scary to all those privacy people out there? Oh yes. This would be just like big internet companies currently do; subscribers will have opt-out options, so that they don’t get any targeted information. But upside of these personalized and targeted ads, offers and content recommendation will make most of the subscriber to opt-in so that they don’t have spend time searching on internet as discovery is just becoming harder and harder.

Well for scenario (b) to happen, mobile carriers need to make transformation that they are just not pipe and they need to become a data driven company just like other web2.0 companies and to take advantage of the current situation. I personally want scenario b to play out so that power is distributed; it’s not just couple of big software and web2.0 companies control everything.