Keeping a focus on operating costs was somewhat neglected during the early days of cellular. The drive to deploy networks and gain subscribers was considered paramount, and operators decided that sorting out the growing operating costs associated with these two business objectives could wait for another day. That day has come.

Mobile broadband has been a slippery target. GPRS was once hailed as offering speeds in excess of 100kbit/s, with reality proving dramatically worse. 3G was the next contender, which came closer to hitting the mark – but still lacked any comparison with a fixed broadband service. Now the talk is of wireless providing speeds of between 10Mbit/s and 100Mbit/s – can this be real?
 

Managed mobile services, along with their baby siblings hosted services, used to represent quite a junior league business opportunity. For the companies that supplied these services the rewards were relatively modest. What was actually supplied was often very limited in scope. And the companies that bought these services and products tended not to be members of any Tier 1 operator’s club. This, emphatically, is no longer the case.
 

For around one-third of the world’s population, the mobile handset has become an essential adjunct to their lives. Priceless at some times – and a nuisance at others – mobile handsets have also, for many, become a defining asset showing their lifestyle and their worth, especially amongst the youth markets and developing countries.