LATAM Telecom

John Delaney and Vincent Poulbere from Ovum bring to our attention how mobile advertising can help operators face their two biggest challenges: declining ARPUs and expanding their reach into media. An interesting initiative by GSMA announced at Barcelona was the creation of a Working Group to define common metrics and measurement processes for mobile advertising. Vodafone, Telefonica, T-Mobile, Orange and 3 are the five members of this group. Ovum mentions other activities at Barcelona that clearly show enthusiasm for bringing advertising into the mobile world such as round table discussions and initiatives by different vendors including Comverse Mobile Advertising Solution, Nokia's Media Network, Openwave's Contextual Advertising and Amdocs' mobile advertising solution. While we applaud their efforts, we should note that operators have still a lot of work ahead to catch up and bring the web to the mobile world. Internet advertising has come a long way but it remains unchar...

From UNSTRUNG NEWS ANALYSIS, René Obermann, CEO of Deutsche Telekom AG is quoted stating that even though Europe is not selling as many iPhones as AT&T, the iPhone is helping to drive up mobile data use ( iPhone Data Booms at T-Mobile ). This is interesting news for operators in Latin America interested in launching the iPhone. The unique situation of the US market sometimes makes it difficult to undertand how a certain product, service or strategy might work if launched in Latin America, so looking at European markets, who have alos high prepaid subscribers and similar pricing plans, helps a lot. In Latin America, mobile demand continues to grow (it is expected to surpass 500M subscribers by 2010, according to Pyramid Research) but voice ARPU has been falling for the last five years. Operators are looking at data to offset this fall and the iPhone hype seems to fit in nicely with this strategy. Interestingly, this was also named as a challenge to European operators by the UNSTRUNG...

According to Cellular News , Apple also has reached exclusive deals with T-Mobile in Germany and France Telecom , and is expected to reach exclusive deals with operators in Russia and China. The article points out how Apple's strategy may limit their potential in the long term, since cellphone industry giants are fighting back with cellphones of their own to counter the iPhone. Apple's strategy is to work through exclusive deals such as AT&T in the USA. What about Latin America? We have heard rumors since the hype of the iPhone launch started earlier this year, that both America Movil and Telefonica were in talks with Apple. So far it seems that Apple is only willing to do a negotiation per country, which leaves the door open to different scenarios. According to Telecompaper , Claro is in talks for iPhone contract. Telcel Mexico officially addressed the issue in June this year through their spokesperson, Patricia Ramirez ( source ) where she stated the operator's inter...