Telecoms Tech

The mobile communications sector continues to advance -- with new handheld devices driving mobile internet usage. Juniper Research estimates that the number of smartphone shipments reached almost 200 million in Q1 2013, representing a growth of 30 percent from the same quarter in 2012.

The mobile payments market has long been gestating in developed markets, and is now finally starting to gain momentum in terms of product launches and levels of investment from significant players across the financial services, IT, and telco markets. However, it is clear that the market is unlikely to reach a big bang moment, and will instead continue to evolve on several fronts at once.

We have previously reported on the FCC’s campaign to stamp out cell phone jamming devices. It turns out that the Commission has apparently found some guerilla allies in that campaign. In two recent Notices of Apparent Liability, two companies have been whacked with six-digit fines – $126,000 in one case, $144,000 in the other – for operating jammers. Both times the Feds were called in by anonymous tipsters.

​Media tablet apps will generate $8.8 billion in revenue in 2013, compared to the $16.4 billion expected from smartphone apps, according to the latest market study by ABI Research. Of the combined $25 billion applications revenue, 65 percent will come from Apple’s iOS ecosystem, 27 percent from Google’s Android, and the remaining 8 percent from the other mobile device platforms.

According to the latest market study by Juniper Research, a growing user acceptance of push mobile banking and a sharp rise in media tablet adoption will drive users of transactional mobile banking services to almost 200 million in 2017. The tablet user base will represent approximately 19 percent of total mobile banking customers in 2017, compared to 9 percent this year - as consumers engage in increasingly mobile lifestyles.

As reported recently by Ezra Klein, a groundswell of support has coalesced for unlocking cell phones with the White House joining the frag aligned against the wireless carriers. The wireless industry offers several justifications, but relies principally on the ruling by Copyright Office of the Library of Congress that unauthorised unlocking of cell phones is a violation of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.

According to the latest market study by International Data Corporation (IDC), vendors shipped 367.7 million desktop PCs, portable PCs, tablets, and smartphones -- collectively called "Smart Connected Devices" -- in the fourth quarter of 2012 (4Q12), that combined market was up by 28.3 percent from the prior year.

According to the latest market study by Portio Research, the mobile apps business has matured. The worldwide apps market generated an impressive $12 billion in 2012, and in total 46 billion apps were downloaded in the year. That is certainly an indication of a market in rapid growth.