Mobile services: Opportunities for the Indian software industry

Abstract

The network operators must continuously implement new services on their networks if they want to slow or turn around the trend of decreasing ARPU. Further, they need to continuously balance network resources used for voice against those for data, particularly in areas where there is high density of users The reason being that instead of "on" when needed mode in case of circuit switched networks; the new paradigm would be the always-on mode. Today, the billing is based on call time, tomorrow, with the 2.5G and subsequently 3G networks, one will see value based , bandwidth based and QOS based pricing schemes Based on the prevalent transmission technology, different regions will see different evolution paths that will all finally culminate in the common adoption of the WCDMA as the transmission enabler As a direct result of the different evolution paths being followed, the services that will be available to the mobile consumer will differ, rather, be available at different time lines North America lags behind Europe in terms of market development today. Consequently, North America will lag behind Europe in the deployment of narrow band application. However, when it comes to deploying broadband applications (e.g. Video streaming), North America will lead Europe. The reason - CDMA is already the deployed technology on North America and the migration path to W-CDMA is shorter than that in Europe. The industry being characterized by its multitude of standards, interoperability will be a key issues in the near future. Further, there is already an existing installed base of Internet enabled applications that need to be enabled on the mobile device. This offers tremendous software development and system integration possibilities Application "insulation" is a key aspect, which any wireless services development company should pay attention to. Marketing of any such company should focus on forming alliances with key players across the value chain. The strategy would be to co-brand and co-bundle applications with middleware vendors and application platform vendors. Also important, in this rapidly evolving stage of the market, is to participate in various wireless forums so as to get an understanding of where the market & the technology are heading • The ideal business model to start with would be to proceed on a T&M (Time & Material) basis, since it gives an opportunity to understand the wireless domain in greater detail before one undertakes high investments. • For a start-up, getting software development manpower with the requisite wireless domain skills will be an important issue as the technology is new and evolving rapidly. Having a strong core technical team, who will also be able to train "raw" manpower will be a key success factor