I was quite surprised when I attended the now traditional Arab Advisors telecommunications conference this year. Not by the topics. Not by the content of the presentations. What was most surprising to me was the “mood” expressed publicly or in private by many of the senior managers present: for the first time in nearly ten years, I could not sense a clear direction about where the industry is going and what the industry needs to do. That was a first.

Philippe Vogeleer is an executive with Vodafone Group. He works on long-term development in the Middle East and Africa region

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Shared data plans were pioneered by operators such as Canadian carrier Rogers Wireless, but have been quickly adopted by operators all over the world. Last year Orange UK launched a combined plan for the iPhone 4 and iPad 2 splitting a monthly data allowance, voice minutes, unlimited texts and Wi-Fi access between the two devices, on a single tariff. StarHub became the first operator in Singapore to offer a post-paid plan offering subscribers the ability to share data, minutes and text messages with other users.

Doug Suriano, CTO at mobile data management company Tekelec

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Near field communications (NFC) is starting to make mainstream headlines with many pilots and commercial roll-outs taking place. However, just as with the arrival of 3G, ATMs and chip and PIN bank cards there’s a whole lot of consumer education that needs to take place before people will understand and, more importantly, trust the technology.

Christelle Toureille – Marketing director, Telecommunication Solutions in Middle East, Gemalto

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In the telecom industry many AxPU metrics have been proposed and/or used to assess the business performance of a given telecom market and/or operator. However ARPU (average revenue per user) remains the most strategically regarded and widely accepted metric. It is commonly calculated by dividing aggregated revenues by the average number of subscribers who theoretically generated those revenues during a predefined time period – typically a month as adopted by most telecom carriers. More interestingly, focused ARPU figures are calculated for specific services in a bid to identify the largest sources of revenue generation, as they are calculated according to diverse factors such as geographic location, user age, occupation, and income.

Jamoussi believes it is time to contest assumptions such as low-ARPU markets are unprofitable, while high-ARPU ones are

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Unsolicited text messages, web page banners while browsing the mobile Internet and banner ads on idle screens… These formats still constitute the most predominant types of mobile advertising that mobile phone users are exposed to today, and are largely initiatives based on formats from the online world of advertising.

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