AppTrigger, Inc. announced the results of a recent mobile phone
survey revealing that North American mobile users are still heavily
reliant on traditional voice and text features, despite a willingness
to adopt newer, advanced applications.
According to the study, which sampled 250 mobile phone users in the
United States and Canada in August 2008, the mobile carrier market is
falling short in leveraging their revenue producing voice subscribers
into new services opportunities. In response to the current advanced
application landscape, 74 percent of respondents indicated that they
desire additional services on their mobile devices, but still prefer
voice as the main communication channel.
The mobile user's heavy reliance on traditional voice presents a
business case for mobile service providers to build on voice as the
killer application. Those surveyed cited voicemail (50 percent) as a
feature they use at least once a day. In comparison, the majority of
users sampled indicated that they desire advanced features like mobile
email capabilities on their phone - despite the fact that users rarely
use this service for daily personal use (22 percent).
Editors Note:
Another survey from a mobile email company SEVEN says that mobile email is the top application with their users.
"Mobile service providers need to recognize that traditional voice
is still the killer application with mobile users," said AppTrigger's
Patrick Fitzgerald, SVP of Global Sales and Marketing. "The carrier
market's inability to maximize ARPU is the residual effect of a greater
short coming. If operators were equipped to continue building ARPU on
multiple network architectures, taking advantage of new and old, they
would be able to leverage "voice" as a feature to create new
applications for incremental service revenue."
The mobile customer's desire to use advanced applications should not
be mistaken. In the past five years, 52 percent of respondents began
text messaging more frequently, while 23 percent now use their phone
for mobile email.
"Mobile usage is shifting toward enriched forms of communications
like Instant Messenger, mobile email, Internet browsing and picture
messaging" says Fitzgerald. "But until operators realize a business
model that allows for consistent ARPU growth across multiple
architectures, user offerings will continue to fall short. Leveraging
existing voice services along with innovative NGN based applications
bridges the service gap. Operators need to begin looking toward network
migration strategies that offer cost effective, scalable value-added
benefits of advanced services on new and legacy networks."
AppTrigger's flagship Ignite Application Session
Controller (ASC) addresses the lack of interworking between legacy and
next generation networks, and provides a compelling solution to the
competing architectural agendas between vendors. The ASC is a network
element that negotiates and manages connections between the application
and services layer, and the underlying network layer, enabling service
providers to maximize available revenue from existing services while
making it easier to introducing new applications.
For more information about how the ASC can help ignite mobile
business and to view complete survey data, please visit
www.apptrigger.com/namobilesurvey.