AMTA Members were last night updated on the industry’s latest trends, challenges and opportunities by industry analyst Nathan Burley of Ovum at a Members Forum in Melbourne.

Mr Burley, an analyst in Ovum's Asia-Pacific research team, provides research and strategic advice to wireless operators, vendors and regulators. His focus is the Asia-Pacific mobile industry, specialising in mobile access technologies, data strategies and services.

He said the rapid uptake of 3G would continue in Australia with 50% of connections next year and 90% by 2012.

Mr Burley said powerful forces were reshaping the telecoms landscape with change becoming more rapid and complex. The convergence of mobile, fixed and broadband was being impacted by regulation, disruptive technologies, the disaggregation of traditional telco value chains, low barriers to entry and the increased sophistication of consumer demand and expectations.

“What is normal today was not invented a few years ago,” he said. “The consumer of the future is very demanding and expects ease of use, a consistent experience, feature and price simplicity across their choice of devices, applications, access technologies, service providers and plans.

“The consumer of the future is best characterized by – whatever, whenever and where-ever.”

Mr Burley said mobile internet would bring some huge challenges for the industry with customer price expectations of free internet services and customers free to go wherever they wanted on the internet.

Under a worst-case scenario operators could be reduced to “internet bit pipes” but still have to deal with their customers’ problems and complaints.

Mr Burley said mobile operators were in a position to be “smart pipes” and act as a platform in the value chain for supporting third-party content and other services.

The market development scenario included:

Operators moving away from closed portal to open mobile internet

Portals no longer an end destination; more of a homepage or gateway to own content, third parties and internet brands

Operators focusing heavily on selling access – mobile broadband and mobile internet

Operators reap a mobile broadband dividend which arrests the decline in communications voice revenues

Over time the access services become commoditised and the dividend takes a hit

New revenue will come from a variety of sources, including advertising revenues, some content and service revenues and B2B revenues

Mr Burley said the mobile internet would bring casualties with operator positioning going through a shake-out. “The integrated web/mobile model is the way forward.”