| Media Week - 7th February 2003 |
| Thursday, 06 February 2003 | |
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Letter of the week by Lars Becker - Oftel decision will have serious impacts for growing mobile market. Oftel's decision to cut call charges to and from mobiles is both good news and bad news for the mobile marketing industry. The mobile telephony industry is a rapidly developing one, requiring enormous investment. However, it is propably unfair to have today's consumer partly pay for this investement in a future that they haven't asked for. Besides, if they were interested in investing, they could have done so by buying shares in a mobile operator. The decision to give the public a fairer deal is clearly welcoming news to the consumer. Reductions of up to 22.5% will be made each time a call is made from a fixed-line to a mobile, or from one network to another. The knock-on effect that this ruling has to the rate of development within the cash-strapped telcoms sector, however, could be cause for concern.Whether the Competition Commission's amendment to operators licences is the reason behind O2's plans to substantially delay the launch of its 3G network, or a timely excuse, is irrelevent. Stifling progress is never healthy, especially in a sector that is shouldering more than £22bn of debt form expenditure on 3G licences, paid to the same government behind the ruling. The timing of 3G's rollout by the operators - whether it's Hutchison's foray into the market later this year, or Vodafone in two or three years form now - will have a sizeable effect on the growth of the mobile marketing sector. There are still enormous opportunities to be explored with the humble SMS. But 3G will be a tremendous push for the whole industry. So cutting termination charges indirectly impacts on the growth of our industry in the medium term. However, there is an upside. The next logical step, would be to cut similar termination charges to SMS messages. Currently mobile operators are charging each other three pence interconnection charges to terminate SMS messages. This keeps bulk SMS at artificially high levels, making mobile marketing campaigns more expensive. Dear Oftel, please cut these oligopolistic rates too. © Copyright Flytxt Ltd 2006. Unauthorized use of any content constitutes a material breach. |
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