The bit that doesn't make money uses 85% of the capacity
Vodafone Germany’s network is “morphing into a video network” according to its CEO, Jens Schulte-Bockum, speaking to an audience at the QualcommIQ event in Berlin.
Schulte-Bockum said that although there were many advantages to LTE, the operator is finding that 85% of the network traffic is video traffic.
Voice, text, other messaging and data – “everything that makes money for us” – uses less than 15%. He added, “The bit that doesn’t make money uses 85% of the capacity. Clearly we are thinking about how we can monetise that. [mobile video].”
However, he stopped short of identifying what those monetisation methods might be, although he did say that he thinks LTE has the potential to be a “game changer” commercially. It's also worth pointing out that video is of course earning money indirectly for Vodafone. The ability to watch video with half decent quality is likely to be one of the attractions for consumers signing up for the service and taking their data bundles.
That said, the operator is clearly looking to add revenues beyond that of being a pipe for video.
“Vodafone is moving from being a pure connectivity provider to becoming a connectivity and service enabler. The innovation we are looking into is how to put additional layers onto our core network capability around managed security, payments, QoS management that make it easy for third parties to put deep vertical applications on our network.”
He added that being able to deploy in 800MHz was a major advantage because it meant the operator could easily map the LTE network onto its 900MHz GSM grid. That meant it could offer parallel coverage for voice and broadband data.
There was no mention of VoLTE, or really of RCS (Vodafone Germany has just launched a Beta RCS app on Google Play) – indicating that at the moment the operator is still in a “LTE for data, GSM for voice” mindset.
As for performance, Vodafone is finding that it is offering real life download speeds of 20Mbps and 10Mbps on the uplink, with latencies of 50ms.