In
mature telecom markets, most carriers have faced saturation in customer bases
and slow revenues growths in the past five years. The top-4 carriers in the US,
Verizon, AT&T, Sprint and T-Mobile, together only achieved total revenues
growth of US$24.4 billion from 2008-2012 with a CAGR of 2.28%, implying that
increasing customer numbers should no longer be the focus of the mature telecom
markets. The focus instead must be on increasing the value to be contributed by
customers, according to Digitimes Research.
The 4G
LTE era has seen significant improvements to transmission speeds with the fee
rates for related services also seeing structural changes. As mobile multimedia
services are able to create high data transmission flows, the LTE broadcast
business, which allows telecom carriers to be the main host of the services,
has attracted much interest in the telecom sector.
Our
believes the LTE broadcast business will have three major advantages in terms
of development. First, it is 3GPP's evolved-multimedia broadcast multicast
services (eMBMS) standard, which is able to enhance spectrum utilization and
supports up to 20MHz.
The
second is that LTE broadcast services are able to optimize spectrum usage by
distributing spectrum resources based on telecom network's loading. The third
is the support of multimedia codecs such as HEVC and MPEG-Dash to help reduce
loading on network bandwidths and strengthen usage experience.
The
fee rates for 4G services, which are based on the transmission volumes, should
benefit from the surging data flow demand and start contributing revenues to
carriers. As more countries will start commercial LTE network services, the potential
the LTE broadcast business has started gaining much attention.
Among
the telecom carriers worldwide, only Korea Telecom (KT) started offering
commercial LTE broadcast services in January 2014, while others are mostly
still conducting pilot runs because such services require coordination between
hardware, the mobile network, and content supply.
Although
equipment suppliers are aggressive about such a business opportunity, telecom
carriers remain cautious. Therefore, Digitimes Research believes that for the
LTE broadcast business to grow to a large-scale commercial sector it will still
take some time. For many telecom carriers, it is in their medium- to long-term
plans.
No content
All rights reserved Copyright (C) 2009-2019 ying an jie technology (Hong Kong) co., LTD