Emerging Asia Pacific's 3.7 billion population will become much heavier users of mobile broadband services over the coming five-year period. Non-handset-based mobile broadband connections (including USB modems, tablets and e-readers) are expected to grow from 59 million in 2012 to 193 million in 2017.
Mobile broadband will grow by 27% CAGR in emerging Asia-Pacific markets over the coming five years, while developed Asia-Pacific markets will grow by a CAGR of 21%.
The growth of mobile broadband connections in emerging and developed Asia-Pacific markets will be significantly ahead of that in Western Europe and North America, which will achieve CAGR of 13% and 16%, respectively, over the same period.
The provision of differentiated and innovative tariffs will be the key to helping operators to grow mobile broadband take-up throughout Asia Pacific. Aligning tariffs more closely with user needs will assist in stimulating take-up.
Japan's NTT DoCoMo applies tiered, volume-based pricing to its Xi data plans, which offer download speeds up to 112.5 Mbps. There are two Xi data plans, tiered to accommodate both light and heavy users, and to avoid bill shock.
One plan charges subscribers 2,470 yen (about $25) as a basic monthly fee. For data consumption between 3.1MB and 20.2MB, an additional charge of about $3 per 1KB applies.
In the other plan, if data usage exceeds 20.2MB, the monthly fee is $82 for up to 7GB per month, after which bandwidth is throttled to 128kbps at $25.
In emerging Asia-Pacific markets, the provision of time-limited tariffs (data allowances are restricted to a certain period of the day) is growing, which will assist in promoting take-up.