Looking for new allies in mobile internet market

Abstract

The unprecedented increase in the mobile data traffic volume, as well as the need for network coverage expansion are major concerns for mobile operators. Although new pricing regimes have been actually employed to affect user's behavior over the usage of the network resources, operators still face challenges related to congestion management, cost reduction and revenue generation. Operators are induced to look for new allies in the mobile Internet market and introduce more innovative incentive mechanisms. Sponsored data, where an operator negotiates with a content provider so that content of the latter is free to end-users, motivates content providers to be more actively involved within the Internet value-chain. Another paradigm is offloading via user-provided networks (UPN), which motivates end-users acting as providers to extend mobile network coverage. We investigate incentives provision by network operators for making alliances with both content providers and end-users, including insights from the business perspective.