NEWS Bad news on the mobile data front - consumers are too impatient to put up with data hassles and businesses aren't showing as much appetite for rollouts, research has found.
According to a report from analyst house IDC, mobile data is experiencing slower than expected uptake in the corporate world.
The report found just six per cent of businesses in western Europe polled said they are interested in deploying mobile applications including m-commerce and push-to-talk, while fewer than 10 per cent said they are interested in business-centric apps such as salesforce automation or CRM on handhelds.
Separate research has found that the picture may be equally bleak for consumer data services, with a survey conducted by NOP for mobile firm Olista finding that 64 per cent of customers will give up on using a data service, such as downloading ringtones, if they don't get the service to work straight off.
The survey also found just two per cent of consumers will ring customer services to solve their problems.
Still, there's one mobile data service that will continue its mushrooming growth – text messaging. A recent report predicted that the SMS phenomenon will be worth $50bn by 2010.
Comments
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1. Tony Mudd
The low take-up of mobile data services has nothing to do with the obscene price of it. £4 per Mbyte is rediculous.
The only people who can afford to use it are big business - and even some of those have stopped their employees using GPRS.....
3 missed the chance to clean up on the data front, by offering it faster and cheaper than the other 4 networks, but, no, they think we want to watch football instead.
2. anonymous
i'm sure the Blackberry market (Still growing) and the Microsoft device market (Growing massively) and the MMS market (Growing the fastest) will love yet another report saying how poor the industry is, when are these stupid analysts going to get something right, and when are they going to be held up and asked WHY? when the fail (and continue to fail) to do so?
sheeesh
3. Peter Balchin, airwide solutions
In the 'old days' when SMS first started we experienced similar problems. It was perhaps even a bit worse because some operators use to charge subscribers to actually turn SMS on. The result: few users and slow uptake of data services. So, what is the relevance of this story? Well, the solution was fairly simple. Operators stopped charging an activation fee for SMS services and they automatically enabled subscribers to use the service. The result was a slow but steady boom of SMS. Obviously other factors led to the boom such as prepaid and pricing it right.
What can the industry learn from this? Whilst subscribers can today receive an MMS message, they still need to configure their handset to send an MMS message. Therein lies the problem.
Whilst preconfigured handsets allow the user to initially use data services like MMS, with time where subscriber change their handsets as well as natural churn, the initial settings on the handset effectively change. As this survey highlights, 64% of subscribers give up using a data service if they don't get it to work the first time they use the service - it is clear that operators with the capability to automatically configure handsets will have a key differentiator from competitors.
'Device management' will drive the mobile market forward from both the user and operator aspects. For now SMS is still KING but who knows what the future holds!