Low-cost MVNOs, shaking up a stagnant European prepaid market, are threatening to grab as much as 15 to 20 percent of the available market share over the next five years, according to Strategy Analytics. Operators are finally waking up to this unpleasant truth, and are reacting by launching their own low-cost offers, like "Simyo," from E-Plus, which launched last week in Germany. However, the threat from no-frills players still looms large over the entire mobile industry. Although prepaid users now account for 60 percent of mobile users in Western Europe, these prepaid users are now being targeted by low-cost MVNOs offering significantly lower call rates. "Even though prepaid was the engine that accelerated mobile growth in Europe," said Sara Harris, Senior Industry Analyst at Strategy Analytics, "the majority of prepaid offers today are not only expensive, but they ignore customer demands for drastically lower-cost pricing. Thus, low-cost MVNOs have been able to storm into the market appropriating customers for whom price is king."
The industrial sector is on the eve of a wireless transformation, driven by an urgent demand for greater network capacity, reliability, and deterministic performance. Historically, manufacturers and mission-critical operations have relied on wired networks — favoring their predictability — because spectrum congestion in legacy 2.4GHz and 5GHz bands limited confidence in wireless for operational technology (OT) environments. However, with the introduction and rapid adoption of the 6GHz spectrum, compounded by significant advances in Wi-Fi standards, industrial facilities are now poised to embrace wireless LANs as the backbone for automation and digital innovation. Industrial WLAN Market Development Recent research from ABI Research forecasts that over 70 percent of industrial-grade wireless LAN access points (WLAN APs) shipped in 2030 will support the 6GHz band. This is a leap from 2 percent in 2023, highlighting a rapid and profound technological shift. The market for ruggedized indust...