For the eighth consecutive year: Comprehensive business benchmark with 890 KPIs covering revenue, OPEX, CAPEX, headcount productivity, subscriptions & channels, performance, load, quality and innovation & growth – for 54 functions of mobile, fixed/cable and integrated operators.
Peer group data exclusively from Swedish, Finnish, Norwegian and Danish operators. Due to pre-agreed confidentiality requirements, participating operators are anonymous (and of course their data).
The past three months have been a testing time for the UK mobile and broadband service providers, as many of them have battled with outages, vandalised phone masts amid lurid 5G conspiracy theories, extreme demand peaks. Store closures have placed added pressure on field, customer service and call centre staff who have been largely working from home. We all know the drill. All of us just want to get on with ‘getting back to normal’, safely past Covid-19, to life as we used to know it. But we don’t know how long it will take, or even if we will have the same breadth of services on the high street as before. Today, 15th of June, the shops are gradually and carefully opening their doors on UK high streets.
Tefficient’s 26th public analysis on the development and drivers of mobile data ranks 105 operators based on average data usage per SIM, total data traffic and revenue per gigabyte in 2019.
There are two types of operators when it comes to 5G: Those who act and those who wait.
Management of the latter type are often quoted saying that it’s within B2B that 5G will make a difference. It seems to be an excuse for not taking any action on B2C – or even for not taking any 5G action at all.
Lobbyists coined the term “the race to 5G”. If there ever was such a race, South Korea won it as unlike other markets there are – read on – many reported numbers to support a leadership claim. With 4.7 million 5G subscriptions by the end of 2019, 7% of Korea’s mobile subscribers used 5G just nine months after launch.
LG U+ site with Huawei 5G gear on the Namsan park above Seoul (photo: Fredrik Jungermann)
The subscriber take-up has been fast, but not linear. In August, September and October, when Samsung launched three new 5G smartphones (Note 10, A90 and Fold) and LG updated its V50 smartphone, 5G sales was exceptionally fast. During November and December no new smartphones were introduced and South Korea missed the expectation of 5 million 5G subscribers by year end 2019.
5G subscriber base per month since launch 5th of April (source data: MSIT)
Without subscription growth it’s difficult for mature market operators to report service revenue growth.
Some operators – anxious to still show growth – have thus begun to regularly highlight their fixed-mobile convergence base in quarterly results presentations. It’s most often a smoke screen. Here are seven examples – of which six aren’t growth stories.
Tefficient’s 24th public analysis on the development and drivers of mobile data ranks 115 operators based on average data usage per SIM, total data traffic and revenue per gigabyte in 1H 2019.
The data usage per SIM grew for all; everybody climbed our Christmas tree. More than half of the operators could turn that data usage growth into ARPU growth– for the first time a majority is in green. Read our analysis to see who delivered on “more for more” – and who didn’t.
Speaking of which, we take a closer look at the development of one of the unlimited powerhouses –Taiwan. Are people getting tired of mobile data?
We also provide insight into South Korea– the world’s leading 5G market. Just how much effect did 5G have on the data usage?
Nowhere else in the world will you find as many 5G users as in South Korea. Nowhere else will you find as many 5G base stations up and running. If there ever was a race to 5G, the Korean government and industry won it.
Seeing is believing: After having dug up, read and compiled all reporting and data on Korea’s mobile business there was no other way forward than to seeing it for ourselves and interview people involved in creating Korea’s ‘5G wonder’.
We spent eight busy days (11-18 July) in Seoul to finish a comprehensive 106-page analysis – full of graphs and photos – with recommendations for European operators.
This is tefficient’s 23rd public analysis of the development and drivers of mobile data.
Mobile data usage is still growing in all of the 39 countries covered by this analysis. Two countries stand out – China and India.
But China and India aren’t yet challenging the usage top – where the two unlimited superpowers, Finland and Taiwan, still reign.
Data-only remains a key driver for overall usage and new figures from Czech Republic, Latvia, Finland and Austria add insight to the extreme usage pattern of fixed wireless access.
