Hi James,
Good question. As mentione dduring my section of the webinar it is very important to operators in the emerging markets area that total cost of ownership relating to service is a low as possible, which means upfront costs for deployment, harware and software and ongoing operational overheads, support etc. vendors need to be aware of this and package their solutions according for this target market-e.g. allow the operator to start off with a low capacity system to help reduce initial investment costs and grow as more subscribers start to use the service. Equally operators must incentivise their users to avail of the service and must be sensitive to their spend potential. making the price too high will marginalise uptake, making it too low will increase adoption but at no economic benefit to the operator. So there is a balance to be reached. One idea as mentioned in the webinar is to offer no commitment pay as you go time/volume based access to service which if offered at the right price , will attract in new users. Incentivise further by providing access to limited content for free ( could also be limited to a promotional perdiod). Subsidize with ads etc

Regards
michael

I beleive it is as if you leave it out and focus on the middle class and I’m assuming high end users the operator is very much limiting their ROI. Yes you can probably get better ARPU from such users but theer are less of them. also they will consume more data in the network (e.g. if they are using smartphones) and so operators costs will increase. By adopting server side adaptation technology the reach of a mobile web service increases immensely to the mass market feature phone segment. Yes operator must sell the service at a lower cost in this case but with more users even paying a small amount per day or hour pass to access the web will quickly lead to an attractive revenue stream. Also feature phone users will consume less data per session and so the costs in supporting these subscribers is less.