The strong and sudden rise of
Mobile Broadband (
HSPA) services over the past year is fast eclipsing more traditional '
location specific'
Wi-Fi Hotspots, reports
Point Topic. Unlike
Wi-Fi, cell based
Mobile Broadband services have a wider coverage and can sometimes even be used as a fixed-line replacement.
UK mobile phone companies have managed to grow their market share to 47% of users accessing the Internet away from home or work, which compares with 42% who prefer
Wi-Fi Hotspots. Meanwhile 26% of those who use a mobile network to access the Internet are with
O2.
Orange and Vodafone each take about 20% of the market.
T-Mobile and Three (3) have 14% and 12% respectively:
“
But O2 isn’t the first choice of the new wave users who’ve got dongles or data cards to connect to the network,” says Tim Johnson, Chief Analyst at
Point Topic. “
Vodafone is top in dongle-user market share with 24% of respondents. O2 comes in at 23% followed by Orange, T-Mobile and 3.”
Customer churn also appears to be low among such services, with just 10% of mobile users expecting to change operator within the next six months. Naturally some of this could be down to longer term contract ties, a limitation that several operators have recently begun to remove:
“
There are operators that are losing out. Vodafone and Orange both have a larger share of churners relative to their market share. 22% of respondents who churned had been with Vodafone and 24% with Orange,” says Johnson.
However the study also claims that it is a lot cheaper to send data over
Wi-Fi and, unlike the mobile networks,
Wi-Fi has no problems with capacity. To that end
Point Topic sees dual-mode operation, with mobile broadband users defaulting to
Wi-Fi where it’s available, as the way of the future.
Still, many will be asking why
Hotspot operators continue to charge such high prices for data if
Wi-Fi is supposedly so much cheaper? This continues to be the greatest challenge for commercial
Wi-Fi Hotspot operations, which often seem ignorant of
Mobile Broadband’s threat to their model.