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Monday 18 November 2013

Carrier LTE Application Strategies to Combat OTT Players and Services

Over-the-Top (OTT) applications are those that are provided via the Internet in which only a data connection is required. The wireless carrier is not directly involved and only recognized indirect revenue due to data usage. OTT players and applications have grown to become a significant threat to core services for network operators, most notably voice and messaging. Carriers do not discriminate what is being carried over the data channel and are satisfied (from a data service revenue perspective) to just sign up as many data users as possible. 

LTE brings rather significant capacity gains to the mobile networks, which translates into more bandwidth to offer, more subscriptions to sell, more data consumed, and more data revenue for the carriers. On the demand side, bear services, particularly data, continues to grow at a healthy pace, but there are limits to growth in bearer service for consumer and even enterprise usage. In addition, there is an increasing awareness of Internet Protocol (IP) being cheap source of transport, and hence more people becoming aware of VoIP, and therefore OTT alternatives. 

There is a big migration underway from traditional voice to data. This is not to mean that voice goes away in favor of only non-voice services. What this really means is that traditional circuit-switched (bearer) is going away, and eventually with it, traditional voice calling plans. With this evolution of bearer services becoming marginalized, the payload itself becomes the value and the simple carriage of data becomes a marginalized commodity. With this development, Value-added Service (VAS) applications become much more important to the network operators. Carriers can either sit idly by while this happens or take proactive action. We recommend the latter !!

This research evaluates the OTT threat to wireless carriers and provides specific strategies and recommendations to compete and win in the marketplace. The report evaluates the general market drivers for VAS applications and the competitive factors issues relative to OTT player offerings. The report includes analysis of LTE enabled application benefits and challenges and presents an application roadmap.

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