Mobile broadband will have marked national characteristics

While the coming of mobile broadband and its ability to bring the Internet to mobile phones is a foregone conclusion, the market drivers, business model and revenue sources will vary vastly between countries, applications and operators.

One of the key drivers for the mobile Internet will be to bring previously unavailable services to a large portion of the world’s populations, Jon Fredrik Baksaas, CEO of Norway’s Telenor, said. According to Baksaas, 80 per cent of the world still has no access to fixed line services, 60 per cent has no access to financial services and there are only 142 physicians for every 100,000 inhabitants globally - the mobile Internet will play an important part in bringing access and services to the portion of the population that were previously outside the coverage of the legacy information infrastructure, Baksaas said.

On the other side of the spectrum, Shin Bae Kim, CEO of Korea’s SK Telecom, painted a completely different picture: of a mobile Internet in a market that is highly penetrated by both mobile and fixed broadband access. According to Kim, HSPA now makes fixed and mobile converged services a reality, enabling traditional fixed Internet applications such as social networking on mobiles.

SK Telecom, which now gains 27% of its revenue from mobile Internet services, now has 2.8 million high speed mobile Internet users on its flat rate plan. The adoption of mobile broadband has enabled the operator to become a major player in the social networking and online music scene, Kim revealed, adding that the operator’s Melon music portal has become the biggest music portal in the market with 11 million users who subscribe to a plan that lets them listen to a library of 1.3 million songs for US$5 a month.