Vodafone's (
News 
-
Alert)
recent experience with mobile data traffic has lessons for other global operators.
The value of traffic shaping and retail plans designed for users of different types are key lessons.
Vodafone has been tailoring plans for the different behaviors various consumers have, with important implications for matching data consumption to data revenue.
The focus for Vodafone’s price innovation is squarely on smartphones because this is the category of device that is driving data revenue growth.
In fact, it now is possible to clearly delineate usage of PC dongles, long the main driver of mobile broadband use, and mobile Internet revenue growth driven mainly by smart phones.
Comparing the financial year 2010 to 2011 with the prior year, Vodafone’s mobile Internet revenues increased by 56 percent. This compares with growth of only 14 percent in mobile broadband.
That's a significant change, as 10 years ago most “data revenue” was contributed by use of text messaging.
Tiered pricing is also a prominent feature of Vodafone’s current mobile data pricing strategy. The company is introducing price plans tailored specifically to the needs of low and medium data users.
Careful traffic management will continue to be an essential piece of the data profit puzzle.
Since Vodafone has implemented Web and video optimization in nine of its European markets, it seems to have been able to traffic growth and revenue growth to align.
Where in the 2010 to 2011 period revenue was growing about 20 percent and consumption was growing about 95 percent, it appears that in the 2011 to 2012 period data growth was just a couple of percentage points higher than revenue growth, at about 20 percent for consumption growth and about 18 percent to 19 percent for revenue growth.
Vodafone claims optimization has helped it achieve data volume reductions ranging from 15 percent to 30 percent. Vodafone has also seen a reduction of 20 percent to 30 percent in peer-to-peer traffic in some of its European markets.
Offload of traffic to Wi-Fi networks also will play a part in managing consumption, but it would appear that the huge change is Vodafone’s better ability to match mobile broadband revenue to consumption.
Gary Kim (News - Alert) is a contributing editor for TMCnet. To read more of Gary’s articles, please visit his columnist page.Edited by
Jennifer Russell
