Trends in the United States Mobile Wireless Industry and the Impact of a Merger of AT&T and T-Mobile on the Trends and Overall Competitiveness of the Wireless Industry

Thirty years ago, the United States Federal Communications Commission (FCC) gave birth to the mobile wireless industry by granting two licenses in each cellular geographic market across the United States. In the next three decades the FCC continually provided more access to the electromagnetic spectrum which is a critical input for the provision of mobile wireless communications services to, in part, promote a more competitive market structure in the mobile wireless industry. One objective of this chapter is to describe and analyze the trends in the overall competitiveness of the mobile wireless market during this time by utilizing a modified Porter competitive forces framework. This analysis will be supplemented with an analysis of the most recent proposed merger in the mobile wireless industry – between AT&T and T-Mobile. The proposed merger is an example of a continuing trend in the industry, consolidation of national mobile wireless carriers. This chapter will analyze the impact of proposed merger on the ability of the remaining mobile wireless carriers to constrain the market power of the national wireless carriers in the industry. Specifically, the arguments for and against the merger by major stakeholders are reviewed. There are signs that the mobile wireless industry may return to a duopoly structure. Recommendations regarding the horizontal merger will be offered.

Emerging Mobile Service Applications

This chapter discusses the adoption of Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) technologies as an emerging phenomenon enabling innovative mobile service applications. More specifically, it focuses on the healthcare sector by examining how RFID-enabled Real Time Location Systems (RTLS) can be used to enhance patient care processes while reducing costs of operations. Since different technological designs can be elaborated for a single application, there is a need for practitioners to have a better understanding of the technological options available on the market. Although much information is already available in the literature, many of it is not vendor neutral, resulting in more confusion for practitioners. This chapter addresses this gap by identifying specific comparison variables and using them to highlight the key differences between various RFID-enabled RTLS systems.

Enabling Mobile Service Provision with Sensor Networks

Sensor infrastructures have been deployed in a variety of environments. Currently, many are fixed network configurations; however, Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) are likely to be predominant in the future as wireless technologies continue to evolve, facilitating greater transfer of data payloads such as wireless multimedia. Such a development offers new opportunities for innovative mobile services. For this to occur, there needs to be a greater convergence between conventional mobile computing platforms and sensor technologies, enabling service interoperability and integration. This is not an insurmountable difficulty. This chapter seeks how this issue can be addressed. It considers the state-of-the-art in pervasive sensing and mobile computing, explores the practical issue of engineering software solutions for mobile services that harness sensor components, and proposes a solution based on the intelligent agent paradigm.

Benchmarking Mobile Operators Using DEA

Improving efficiency is becoming crucially important for the European mobile industry due to the increased competition and market saturation over the last years. However, even though there exist diverse studies measuring efficiency using Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) in wire telecommunications, there is a lack of empirical studies measuring the efficiency of the mobile operators. This chapter first outlines the main techniques that are used to measure efficiency of mobile operators. Second, the chapter reviews the use of DEA in the telecommunications industry. Third, the au thors estimate the efficiency of more than seventy European mobile companies between 2007 and 2009. The findings of the DEA employed indicate that the least efficient mobile operators belong to recently joined European Union countries or South East European countries. Finally, they draw the conclusions together with policy and managerial implications based on the DEA results.

Mobile Broadband

This chapter discusses the relationship between fixed-wire and mobile broadband. In the first section, background on the types of broadband connections is provided, and the nature of substitutes and complements is described. For purposes of comparison, findings on the relationship between fixed and mobile telephony are presented. There follows a detailed analysis of fixed and mobile broadband as substitutes and complements. Since fixed-wire broadband is available predominantly in developed countries, the discussion of complementarity between fixed and mobile broadband focuses on developed countries. The chapter concludes with a discussion of the relationship between fixed and mobile broadband in the future and with concluding remarks.

The Development of Mobile Service Applications for Consumers and Intelligent Networks

The enhanced capabilities of mobile handsets are starting to include activities previously associated with traditional desktop computing capabilities. This extends the mobile handset from being used for connectivity to a range of purposes in both consumer and intelligent networks. This chapter examines the development of mobile service applications from current consumer telecommunication applications including context based services (such as location based services) to mobile internet-based services and the forthcoming applications for intelligent networks. Developments of both consumer and industry services in sectors with complex operations are examined in terms of service interactions by reviewing the adoption factors and the provision of services in terms of service characteristics and business models. This chapter develops conceptual frameworks for better understanding mobile services and mobile use in the context of intelligent networks along with emerging consumer applications.

Smartphone Market in China

In this chapter, the current smartphone market in China is investigated and a comprehensive view of the Chinese mobile market is offered to the global audience. The history of the Chinese mobile phone market is introduced, the smartphone market’s benefits and challenges are presented, and the competition in smartphone apps’ market is demonstrated. Besides providing a comprehensive view of the Chinese mobile market, this chapter offers insight to the Chinese government on mobile market regulations and legal enforcement, promotes mobile phone users’ awareness toward mobile application threats, and presents opportunities in the Chinese mobile phone market to the global smartphone manufacturers, mobile application developers, and mobile phone security software vendors.

Why is the Diffusion of Mobile Service Not an Evolutionary Process?

This study aims to explain whether the diffusion of innovation, particularly in the case of mobile service diffusion, can be considered an evolutionary process. To justify this proposition, the mobile service use is considered as artifact-activity couple which represents a dynamic combination of the artifact, i.e. the mobile service and handset, with the immediate set of individual routines that sustain the use and development of mobile technology. This entity also plays a role as a unit of cultural transmission or a unit of imitation, which is analogous to a meme. With this analogy, the diffusion of mobile service can be viewed as a cultural evolution process where its chief mechanism of survival is learning. Thus, as a successful innovation, the mobile service use can be directly taught and spread to others through cultural transmission, i.e. mimicking process. In this process meme plays role as both a replicator and interactor. As a replicator a meme passes most of its structure in sequential replications. As an interactor a meme makes a cohesive interaction with its environment in such a way to generate a differentiated replication. This will lead to selection which in turn can give a rise to a lineage. These processes are identical to selective retention and variation, which are the main features of evolutionary process and determine the dynamic pattern in diffusion process. This indicates that the mobile service diffusion can be viewed as an evolutionary process. Therefore the essential feature of evolutionary conceptions should be incorporated when modeling the diffusion of the mobile service to bring a more realistic explanation of the diffusion process.

HTML5

HTML5 is a standard for structuring and presenting content on the web with a particular emphasis on the mobile web. It can be seen as a collection of individual features that provide developers with additional tools to develop richer content while ultimately providing the user with a much better experience. The authors highlight features of HTML5 in this chapter, as well as its role in improving mobile web technologies.

Incremental Location Matching for Human Travel Route Anomaly Detection

According to a forecast, the worldwide smartphone sales surpassed the world PC sales at the end of 2011. Smartphones are a kind of mobile handheld devices with phone capability or mobile phones with advanced features. Typical smartphone features include microbrowsers, emails, short message services, mobile games, GPS, et cetera. The feature of high mobility and small size of smartphones has created many applications that are not possible or inconvenient for PCs and servers, even notebooks. Location-based services (LBS), one of mobile applications, have attracted great attention recently. This research proposes a location-based service, which uses location information to find travel route anomalies, a common problem of daily life. For example, an alert should be generated when a school bus misses part of a route or a pupil does not arrive at school on time. Different kinds of route anomalies are discussed, and various methods for detecting the anomalies are proposed in this chapter. The major methods use a technique of incremental location search, which finds matched routes as the search route is entered location by location. An alert is generated when no matched routes exist. Preliminary experiment results show the proposed methods are effective and easy-to-use.