Voicemail Tops with NA Mobile Users, Says AppTrigger Inc.

By Reporter Wireless and Mobile News on October 14, 2008 10:39 AM

AppTrigger, Inc. announced the results of a recent mobile phone survey revealing that North American mobile users are still heavily reliant on traditional voice and text features, despite a willingness to adopt newer, advanced applications.

According to the study, which sampled 250 mobile phone users in the United States and Canada in August 2008, the mobile carrier market is falling short in leveraging their revenue producing voice subscribers into new services opportunities. In response to the current advanced application landscape, 74 percent of respondents indicated that they desire additional services on their mobile devices, but still prefer voice as the main communication channel.

The mobile user's heavy reliance on traditional voice presents a business case for mobile service providers to build on voice as the killer application. Those surveyed cited voicemail (50 percent) as a feature they use at least once a day. In comparison, the majority of users sampled indicated that they desire advanced features like mobile email capabilities on their phone - despite the fact that users rarely use this service for daily personal use (22 percent).

Editors Note:

Another survey from a mobile email company SEVEN says that mobile email is the top application with their users.

"Mobile service providers need to recognize that traditional voice is still the killer application with mobile users," said AppTrigger's Patrick Fitzgerald, SVP of Global Sales and Marketing. "The carrier market's inability to maximize ARPU is the residual effect of a greater short coming. If operators were equipped to continue building ARPU on multiple network architectures, taking advantage of new and old, they would be able to leverage "voice" as a feature to create new applications for incremental service revenue."

The mobile customer's desire to use advanced applications should not be mistaken. In the past five years, 52 percent of respondents began text messaging more frequently, while 23 percent now use their phone for mobile email.

"Mobile usage is shifting toward enriched forms of communications like Instant Messenger, mobile email, Internet browsing and picture messaging" says Fitzgerald. "But until operators realize a business model that allows for consistent ARPU growth across multiple architectures, user offerings will continue to fall short. Leveraging existing voice services along with innovative NGN based applications bridges the service gap. Operators need to begin looking toward network migration strategies that offer cost effective, scalable value-added benefits of advanced services on new and legacy networks."

AppTrigger's flagship Ignite Application Session Controller (ASC) addresses the lack of interworking between legacy and next generation networks, and provides a compelling solution to the competing architectural agendas between vendors. The ASC is a network element that negotiates and manages connections between the application and services layer, and the underlying network layer, enabling service providers to maximize available revenue from existing services while making it easier to introducing new applications.

For more information about how the ASC can help ignite mobile business and to view complete survey data, please visit www.apptrigger.com/namobilesurvey.