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June 1, 2005

Mobile growth

Mobile growth: The San Francisco Chronicle had an article this weekend on how mobile phone sales have been exceeding most estimates, forcing analysts like The Gartner Group to revise their figures upward. Device sales are one metric... I'm not sure of the device replacement rate in various regions, but I'm pretty confident that it exceeds the top recorded replacement rates for computer workstations. (ie, people buy new phones more quickly than they ever bought new computers.) But other metrics include the mobile-enabled population of a region (what % of a population is connected?)... the ratio of low-end feature phones to high-end smartphones... the ratio of voice traffic to data traffic... the rate of change in data usage per subscriber (are they using their mobiles more, or less?). Anyway, these cheaper computing/connectivity devices can reach more people in the world, for more minutes in each day, and replacing one isn't as major an investment as with a computer... I'm expecting rapid usage changes over the next five years.

Posted by John Dowdell at June 1, 2005 5:02 PM