Orange Looks For a Differentiator in a Crowded Mobile Market

As we reach a level of market saturation for traditional mobility in Western Europe and North America, the need to differentiate and find new opportunities is floating to the top of the to-do list for carriers. To gain an in-the-trenches perspective from an operator, vision2mobile sat down with Daniel Gurrola, vice president of strategy and business development for the Consumer Mobile Business at Orange, to discuss.

In an exclusive interview, the carrier discusses the role of OTT content, the outlook for Near-Field Communications and M2M in the “Internet of Things," TV-to-mobile multiscreen opportunities, the struggle to find a differentiator in an increasingly crowded mobile market and approaches for dealing with the spike in data traffic.

vision2mobile: What would you call the biggest trend in the European mobile market today?  

Daniel Gurrola: There are many trends emerging in the European landscape. Identifying the biggest trend depends on how it’s defined. Anyone attending Mobile World Congress would have seen tablets and Android – but are those the biggest trends? Our industry changes incredibly quickly, and new hot topics emerge all the time: Data usage is exploding, there is a genuine thirst for connectivity, competition is increasing, both from within and outside our industry, applications are everywhere, and Near Field Communications (NFC) is becoming a significant trend.

We think that 2011 is the year that NFC will come to fruition because the ecosystem around it is nearly in place. Orange is spearheading the final threads of pulling that ecosystem together. With the availability of new NFC-enabled devices from a variety of handset partners to come in 2011, we are moving closer to a world in which we believe mobile contactless services will soon become the norm. Orange has, for example, announced our intention to deliver the Samsung Wave 578, an NFC-enabled handset across France, Spain and Poland from Q2 this year. It will be the first in a series of NFC-enabled handsets that will include devices from LG and Nokia, among others.

By the end of 2011: We aim to equip at least 500,000 of our French customers with compatible devices; the first commercial NFC service will go live in the United Kingdom via the Barclaycard and Everything Everywhere deployment; and over half of all new smartphone models added to our range for Europe will be optimized for mobile contactless services.

V2M: Where do you see the biggest opportunity for mobile operators right now? How will that change in a few years?  

DG: Right now one of our biggest opportunities certainly comes from maximizing potential from the rise in data usage. The surge in demand for data, spurred by the arrival of attractive smartphones, tablets, mobile broadband, and the need for ubiquitous connectivity has provided a real growth engine for operators to leverage. But we can go beyond the now, and simply harness the idea that everything that can benefit from a network connection will, in time, come to have one. This will create a new Internet, one which is not only "human"-driven but device/machine-driven – what some people have termed “the Internet of things." We believe mobile operators have a huge role to play in driving this forward, ranging from M2M to NFC services, and everything in between.