It is no secret that data usage has increased by leaps and bounds in the recent years. Add to it a considerable cut in the roaming charges, and the net outcome is a significant rise in the revenue from mobile roaming.
Examining the trend, in one of its recent reports, Juniper Research revealed that revenue generated from mobile roaming is expected to hit $80 billion by 2017. Given this year’s revenue, estimated at $46 billion, which is dramatically lower than the predicted rate for 2017, this prediction comes as unexpectedly ambitious. But the report confirmed that roaming revenue as a whole is still growing.
The report explained how the entire scenario operates in a cyclic cause-and-effect fashion. Many markets introduced roaming regulations to protect customers from receiving through-the-roof charges on their phone bills. Overall, these changes had a significant effect in bringing down charges, and the report found that the number of active mobile roamers is set to significantly increase over the period as a result of retail price reductions.
Report author, Nitin Bhas pointed out that Wi-Fi and M2M will give further opportunities to the operators to enhance roaming revenue and profit margins.
“There is an increasing number of SIMs used not just within handsets but within an M2M capacity. Operators need to encourage M2M roaming, especially within the telematics segment, via partnerships with global operators,” Bhas noted in the report.
The report predicted that the data revenue will grow at a CAGR of 21 percent and it will account for an increasing proportion of roaming revenue over the forecast period.
At the same time, it was predicted that the proportion of SMS roaming revenue to the global roaming revenue will decline over the forecast period.
Few months back, Juniper Research came up with a report that found that mobile network operators may lose nearly $300 billion to a combination of fraud and billing error by 2016.
The report, called “Mobile Revenue Assurance & Fraud Management: Business Strategies & Forecasts 2012-2016,” found that as the level of billable events has increased – operator-billed revenues totaled more than $900 billion last year – networks have in turn experienced an upsurge in leakage across the revenue cycle from sales to network configuration, rating, and billing.
Edited by
Brooke Neuman
