3G, 3.5G, 3.75G, 4G and beyond ? defining mobile phone services and their business/marketing applications

Résumé du document

With rapid technological advances in communication technology, the cost ownership of mobile telephony devices has drastically come down and the service operators use economies of scale to provide economical plans to millions of subscribers. Mobile services have moved way beyond big handsets with fixed landline cables and the earliest clunky mobile phones were regarded as "prestigious and exclusive? to own a telephone with the only goal of allowing a caller to be heard and speak to the counterpart on the other end. The current generation of mobile phones has moved beyond this and allows users to watch movies, surf the web, pay bills, view and purchase products, and perform many more tasks. This paper aims to define the current mobile phone standards, their possibilities and limitations. Moreover, their current Business/Marketing models are briefly discussed, followed by examples and case studies to bring it to practice.

Extraits

[...] Examples given include clicking on Jaguar or Landrover ads whereby the consumer is redirected to the advertiser's site and is invited to schedule a free testdrive. Consumers enter their ZIP code to locate the closest store where they can make the test drive. Suk (2007) suggests that the best way for developing business and marketing applications would be to create gateways in business and shopping locations where products and services on offer in the immediate vicinity can be advertised. The following section presents case studies on such techniques. [...]

[...] As the Ralph Lauren example shows, the main opportunities for businesses is that with a fast internet connection such as 3G and especially the faster IP based 4G networks, it makes it possible for businesses to reach people at any location. Affordable and fast Internet connections on mobile handsets make people available for e-commerce at any time, at any given location. Telstra also uses the advantages of the 3G networks by offering numerous services on the Beijing Olympics 2008 to mobile handsets. [...]

[...] In this paper we discussed the meaning and significance of different generations of mobile phone technology and also examined the cases where mobile phone marketing applications have been used and how they will be used. It is projected that as the bandwidth increases and becomes affordable, there will be a further increase in mobile applications for entertainment, business and the marketing companies. The pace is not 3G anymore; marketing developers need to jump on board before they miss the 4G train and its opportunities. [...]

[...] Moreover the devices and their user interfaces along with the actual network speed have lived up to their promise only very recently. The evidence of several mobile phone markets (Europe, USA, Australia) being saturated by wireless voice market with penetration levels of nearly 100 per cent, are seeing towards wireless data. (Shim, 2007). According to Reuters (2008) Australian operator Telstra expects to reach 60-70% penetration of its 3G customers by 2010. Interestingly though, Japan and South Korea's 3G penetration 2006 was already not to mention that significant proportion of their total revenue comes from data services (Popudas, 2006). [...]

[...] Artech House Publications. vfconnect. (2008) Bluetooth and telephony marketing applications. Retrieved 11 August 2008 from http://www.vfconnect.com/bt_application.html Zande Serge Van de. (2006) QR coding: a real mobile marketing application. [...]