In case you have a good memory, the title of this post may sound familiar. Back in October last year, I wrote a post on a paper published by Ericsson in which they came to the conclusion that as networks evolve and demand for mobile Internet access rises, the cost of transporting one gigabyte of data over a wireless network can be in the range of 1 Euro. Now NSN has published a similar paper and come to the same conclusion. A very interesting read as they explain very well how they come to their conclusion. It's also in line with the calculations I made in my recent book and it's good to see that the assumptions I made at the time were also made by others to estimate capacity.
An interesting twist of the paper is that it breaks with this nice little graph you might be familiar with showing that as Internet use rises in wireless networks, there's a rift opening up between revenue and amount of CAPEX and OPEX if things left as they are today. The paper actually says that the reverse can happen if network operators evolve their networks: The more the network is used, i.e. the more people pay a monthly usage fee for wireless Internet access, the cheaper it gets per subscriber to transport a certain amount of data for the network operator.
That’s an interesting conclusion, and compltely the opposite to how investors have been thinkingabou the exploding demand for mobile data – i.e. that it will lead to a massive capex surge which will kill cashflow and reduce returns.