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3GSM: The mobile data dream is not dead - Mary Chan

"We are at an inflexion point, and mobile data is about to become profitable," said Mary Chan, president of Alcatel-Lucent's wireless business, as she set out to persuade the mobile market that the newly merged group is up for the fight.

The merger between Alcatel and Lucent has not been easy, and nobody inside the new company is prepared to pretend otherwise. Off the record, network operators here say that with Nokia-Siemens in similar disarray, the market is open for Ericsson to make hay in the infrastructure business.

Chan, fighting back, set out her stall in a well-argued presentation of the new company's merged assets in the market, now including Nortel segments.

Point by point,  she and her colleagues showed what should be accepted as a deep understanding of the issues facing most operators.

For example, Chan pointed out the critical need for enabling the huge potential market of mobile content which could be generated by phone users if the network was there. "If you get the bandwidth - and two megabits per second is probably enough - then the user experience stops being  unpleasant," she said.

NewsWireless asked Chan, after her presentation, whether the backhaul market was not trying to solve problems which the operators were losing interest in solving.

She rejected the idea that mobile data was something that was a fad, or a passing fancy. "Mobile data just needs the right speeds," she re-iterated. "If you look at American operators, there was one which reported revenues of $700 million in 2005, and took that to $1.3 bn in 2006. That's profitable business, and it marks an inflexion point in the market."

The opinion will go down well with mobile content providers, who are still anxious to see the operators increase their mobile data provision - but not all delegates will agree with her positive approach.

One delegate, preferring not to be quoted, said: "If you think that's a big business, then try comparing that one point three billion with the trillion dollars that the world's mobile phone users spend each year on voice. And remember that most mobile operators are not making the profits they are claiming to make."

Another consultant, also asking not to be named, said: "If you look at the figures, 95% of mobile data is actually SMS texts. And that's the profitable bit. Remember that the mobile texting business is a quarter the size of the voice market - and it's still many times the size of the global music business. So if the operators think music downloads can save them, they should think again."