In recent years, mobile telephony has been one of the fastest-growing and most innovative sectors in Telecommunications. Maturity has come, with many markets reaching saturation in terms of mobile phone market penetration. There are very little subscriber growth prospects within the pure voice services. The objective of mobile operators is thus to increase average revenue per subscriber; which can only be achieved by up selling more sophisticated and higher priced services. Driven by this need, wireless telephony is entering a new phase to become a full communications device, offering voice, Internet and data, as well as multimedia, and entertainment capabilities. This new business model, that has been partly proven by NTT DoCoMo with iMode, has yet to materialize elsewhere.

The new generation -- the so-called 3rd generation mobile -- has seen a competing and conflicting set of standards, which have been backed by different vendors, slowing the progress for both the network infrastructure and the handsets. Meanwhile, many have decided to go ahead with a “middle-of-the-road” approach – i.e. implementing what is readily available -- with the 2.5 generation networks (e.g. by migrating to GPRS).

The challenges are therefore numerous as mobile operators have to come up with the right networking technology -- allowing high speed, high bandwidth and high quality for data transmission -- while enhancing value added services to generate higher average revenue per subscriber.