Long-anticipated, and long-feared, some believe that the market for cellular is now saturated. But just what is that market? And why is this current hysteria dead wrong?
There’s a report today in the San Francisco Chronicle that the market for cellular services has reached its natural limit. In other words, everyone who needs a cellular phone has one, and the market for cellular may even be shrinking at this point. Wow! Can this be?
Well, sure, but such ignore key elements that will drive future growth. Cellular has a very bright future ahead of it, and the traditional voice-centric market will be of little interest going forward. The game here will be attracting customers of another service with the usual deals and incentives. This has been standard operating procedure for some time, and shouldn’t be a source of concern.
To get to the point, though, the cellular market is still in the process of diversifying. Data demand, currently limited by soft caps on individual user volume while the carriers continue to add capacity (including Wi-Fi, let’s not forget), will increase. The machine-to-machine (M2M) market is poised for tremendous growth, driven by new opportunities in security, healthcare, and energy management, among others. Look, we’ve got these great wide-area wire networks, augmented by potentially-great public-access local-area wireless networks, capable of addressing essentially any application (yes, even streaming video once there’s sufficient capacity), so “market saturation” isn’t an appropriate term here. Yes, OK, agreed, everyone who needs a handset has one. But the increasingly-broadening range of applications points to anything but saturation in terms of what these networks will be doing in the future.
