Confirmed: 3G/4G License Auction in March 2012

Dear Amna. Even though Mobilink (by its size and by its first-mover-advantage) has the biggest corporate users, it doesn’t still “own” the richest corporate users and the ones that require very fast and reliable data services such as high-tech corporations, who have a lot of staff on the move. Mobilink mostly has the “static” corporate users. Warid, at the other side, has many of the newer fast pace corporate customers as Warid offers the highest network and services quality in the country.

None of the operators will invest on nationwide 3G deployment, but will limit the deployment investments on 3G overlay networks in spots where they have the heavy data users (corporations that are heavy users of data within their customer bases – post-paid and pre-paid alike) such as Karachi, Islamabad, Lahore, Faisalabad, etc. This would be the same strategy for all the 5 operators in Pakistan. Each operators can distinguish itself from others by deploying high-quality 3G services that would give solid and sustainable – not necessary quick – ROI (Return On Investment). Banks, currier services (such as DHL, FedEx), airlines, and armed forces are among those corporate customers that WILL and NEED to use high-speed data services. Any of the 5 operators that already has some of those corporate accounts, has got almost half of the work done. The operator just needs to give them the high-quality services to retain them and to establish an reasonable data ARPU.

Three (3) things that each operators has to do to enhance its 3G strategy and its revenue generation strategy are: (1) to identify the location of the highest paying corporate users (their own and potential ones migrating (churning) from other operators once the high-quality 3G services are available) to define where to deploy the 3G overlay network – don’t be surprised if that doesn’t turn out to be major cities, but places far away such as Baluchistan (smuggling generates money ;-)) or where Pakistani armed forces and various law enforcement operate, (2) to do data usage analysis of existing and potential corporate subscribers, i.e. to find out what data services these corporate users are already using and/or will use, how, where and when, as well as the data traffic pattern. By doing this, the operators can already now define the 3G data packages that they could and should offer to those existing/potential corporate users and also the corresponding price strategy (supply and demand process), and (3) to investigate what 3G handsets are already used by these existing/potential corporate users, available in the market, and the forecast during 2012-2016 or so. The handsets have major impact of the data usage and the data traffic generation, which many of the operators across the world tend to forget/neglect, whereby they get into trouble by congested and wrongly dimensioned networks.

Oh, boy! This is a long story! Let’s wait and see how the market players react!

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