Telecom Lead Asia: Mobile Internet – 3G and 4G — subscriptions on tablets in emerging telecom markets of India and Brazil will be driven by demand for video content and network upgrades.
Last week, Airtel in India announced its Rs 1 per video scheme to boost 2G and 3G data revenue. Rs 1 is the price for video content and mobile users need to spend additional money for downloads.
In India, Aircel, Airtel, Vodafone, Idea Cellular, Reliance Communications, MTS India are in the process of expanding their 3G / EVDO reach. At the same time, Reliance Jio Infocomm will announce its soft launch of 4G / LTE in a couple of months.
The U.S., China, Japan and U.K. will lead markets for mobile Internet subscriptions on tablets.
Strategy Analytics says mobile broadband subscriptions on tablets will grow 8x from 2012 to 2017—as more than 165 million new tablets activate mobile data services.
In 2017 mobile tablet subscriptions will contribute nearly $20 billion to operator service revenues and generate almost 3.5 million Terabytes of mobile data traffic.
4G / LTE will account for more than 80 percent of all mobile broadband tablet subscriptions by the end of 2017.
The near-term driver for tablet subscriptions is operator tariffs that aim to stimulate more tablet connections.
The other growth drivers include lower cost SIM-only prepaid tariffs for tablets and service plans allowing multiple devices to share a pooled data allocation on a single data plan.
AT&T, Verizon Wireless, Turkcell and Vodafone Red have taken lead in the tablet subscriptions.
There are other growth drivers as well.
For instance, bundling connectivity options for tablets such as the 4G Connect comes-with-data model launched by T-Mobile USA and HP on notebooks or the Dell NetReady solution offering integrated 3G mobile connectivity from Telefonica for notebooks and tablets in a pan-European, pay-as-you-go model targeting enterprises will drive the growth.
Direct mobile broadband subscriptions on tablets represent less than 10 percent of the total tablet installed base in 2012.
