Voice has peaked, the future is data

That's entertainment

By Lucy Sherriff • Get more from this author

Posted in Mobile, 17th June 2004 09:48 GMT

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Revenues from mobile voice calls have topped out, and data will drive all revenue growth in the sector to 2008, says the Yankee Group.

The analyst firm's latest forecasts, released today, suggest mobile voice revenue will peak at around $124bn.

"Voice markets are saturated and voice ARPU (average revenue per user) is declining," says Yankee's Declan Lonergan. "Data ARPU, however, will more than double over 5 years, representing 29 per cent of total ARPU." This will take data revenues to $50bn over the next five years.

Lonergan argues that this is significant both in terms of absoloute numbers, and the kinds for application that will drive fuel the growth. "Entertainment revenue will be key to long-term growth," he says. "Video, music and games will be growing at an impressive rate compared with more nascent data applications such as messaging, which will have begun to stagnate by 2008."

It won't all be fun and games: Yankee expects the number of enterprise data users to double during the same period. ®