The Last Word: Advanced mobile services present new opportunities

The fastest growing technology market in the Middle East is the GSM mobile segment.

As each country in the region has opened up its telecommunications markets to competitive operators, the adoption of GSM mobiles has been meteoric: Egypt shot from 80,000 lines of service in 2000 to more than five million lines following competition.

Jordan has gone from 80,000 to more than 1.2 million. The Kuwaiti market has followed the same pattern and there are new licences in the region set to drive new markets: Bahrain, Saudi Arabia and Oman. Expectations are high in the UAE following the announcement that the market could be opened to new competitors.

With more than 30 million mobile users in the region and tens of millions of new users expected to come on line in the coming years, the market is vibrant.

That is only part of the story because every new mobile user is potentially a user of a range of new services that are just reaching the market, such as mobile multimedia and data services.

The GSM technology, first proposed by the European Union in the late 1980s, is growing. New generation GSM networks are able to support high-speed data transmissions, opening up a new range of mobile services that go beyond telephone services, such as voice mail and other call services.

Building on the huge popularity of SMS, short message services, data services are defining new ways for people to use mobiles.

Data rates

Originally able to manage low data rates of 9.6 kilobits per second, today's GSM networks are using technologies such as GPRS, which are capable of eclipsing the data rates of the digital ISDN technology and EDGE, which drives data rates up into the area known as broadband, between 120 and 220 Kbit/s - much faster than today's dial-up internet speeds.

Today's GSM mobile is capable of supporting better internet access than traditional dial-up fixed lines.

That means a whole range of new multimedia services can be supported, including totally mobile internet access through a PDA (personal digital assistant, or palm computer) or notebook computer.

Telephone services have expanded to include content-based services, such as picture messages, and the promise of more advancements, such as full-video services. That is before recognising the capabilities of the next generation mobile technology supported by 3G or third-generation networks.

The opportunities for Middle East technology companies are enormous: every one of these mobile subscribers is a potential customer for new services made available over these high-speed mobile data links, from developing and providing multimedia content for recreational use to defining new services for business users who want to gain the most out of mobile internet access.

Applications

Companies are finding new ways of working, using their newly empowered and totally mobile staff, building new applications that support new categories of customer service.

There is a real and growing need for a new category of content and service provider in the region, companies that work with network operators to build services that people want based on the widespread availability of high-speed mobile data access.

As the market grows and as the region's operators build new customer bases, the market has a real chance to define, market and sell a new range of services based on the convergence of information and communication technologies.

Those new entrepreneurs are going to need to clearly define their offerings and market them effectively to target customers, building differentiation as others take up the opportunity to reach tens of millions of subscribers to the new services to come.

The technological breakthroughs that are already being made require clear enunciation for operators to listen and support rolling out those new services and content offerings, subscribers need a clear call to action that attracts them and suits them.

The old-fashioned marketing skills of positioning and differentiation will become ever more important to a new generation of high-growth regional technology companies. Having the technology will not be enough, it is going to be the marketing of the technology that defines winners.

The writer is executive director of Spot On Public Relations.