This year, the worldwide mobile industry is expected to become a $1 trillion business. Growing from nearly ground zero to about 30 percent CAGR is an unparalleled achievement.

Mobile voice service prices, however, have been declining and margins have been shrinking. Faced with maturing markets, cellphone companies and network operators recently began pushing products and services into rural and low-end areas in developing countries. Now, they must pull margins up in the high-end market with new services and products.

The worldwide non-voice services in 2007 accounted for about a fifth of mobile service revenues, according to Portio Research Ltd. This segment is expected to reach over a quarter of the revenues by the end of 2012. To boost margins and expand subscriber base, network operators are looking at these services, including mobile music, email, mobile TV and video downloads, location-based services, games, gambling and mobile payment services.

Keeping track
An emerging pull for high-end users is pedestrian navigation, which may include features such as public transportation, highlighted points of interest and other contextual location-based services. Several services are already available with Nokia Maps 2.0. It supports assisted GPS, pedestrian orientation using a compass feature and adds a pedestrian navigation "Walk" function for 61 countries. Fourteen of these countries are in Asia, including China, India, Singapore and Taiwan.

A new technology, the femtocell, is expected to take cellphones indoors where they'd share data and control home-networked devices via LAN. When in the range of the femtocell, a cellphone automatically detects and uses it in preference over outdoor cell sites. Calls are sent encrypted from the femtocell over an IP network to an operator's main switching center. All standard cellphone features remain available but at a lower cost and higher quality than the outdoor service.

Femtocells still have hurdles to overcome, i.e. standards and interoperability, interference and efficient handover. New 3GPP Release 8 specs contain modifications that will allow handsets to work better with femtos or Home NodeB products. Research and Markets Ltd predicts the first R8-compliant phones will ship at the end of 2010. The firm estimates demand of at least 48 million femto-aware handsets in 2013.

The mobile comms industry is clearly far from running out of steam. With new strategies for the low- and high-end markets, there's reason to expect both market and technology will continue vigorous growth.

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