Mobile communications

We are going to talk about the Mobile Communication market. In this figure I try to synthetize what is understood by Mobile Communication, from the point of view of the market, from the point of view of the numbers that I will present you later.

We have, as you can see, our terminal: a terminal of any kind. We have a part of a radio infrastructure that is what gives us access to the fixed infrastructure of our Telecommunications operator, whatever it is. Well, not whatever, because since some years ago all the operators had infrastructures, however there are now operators without infrastructures: which are what we know as virtual mobile operators, we will talk about them later.

Therefore, we will suppose that we arrive always to a mobile infrastructure, fiber, communication nodes, routers, etc. And from here we can do several things. One of them (the easier) is: to call another mobile, for example, this one above that is a mobile of the same company (in principle we don’t need to know it). But if we call a mobile from the same company, it happens an interesting thing: the call, the information is internal to the own Telecommunication operator, it doesn’t goes through an interconnection point.

Then, as it is a direct traffic, it is what we call On-Net, inside the same network Mobile Communication operator. And from an economic point of view it is important because our operator don’t have to pay a single euro, neither a single cent to anyone. We can do a call to a friend that has also a mobile, here up for example, but if we are Vodafone and he is Orange, for example, there is a moment where physically must exists a traffic exchange. Then, there is an interconnection between Vodafone and Orange, and this means that there is an economic exchange. This means that Vodafone and Orange have to agree about who pays what, who pays more, who pays less.

What more can we do with our mobile? We can call a fixed phone, and, thus, we have an interconnection point where both operators have to agree and they must change traffic and money.

Or we have what is now increasing: Internet access from our terminal. And from here, what we have is a date connection wherever our operator is interconnecting with an IP network, to Internet access, and from here we can access wherever we want.

These are, thus, the four principal services that can be carried out, and which give rise to a market that is now growing very significantly.