The Internationalisation of Mobile Telecommunications

Citation

Milne, R. (2009), "The Internationalisation of Mobile Telecommunications", info, Vol. 11 No. 6, pp. 99-100. https://doi.org/10.1108/14636690910996740

The book offers comprehensive numbers about aspects of the international evolution of mobile network operators. Specifically, it provides tables showing which multinational operators had stakes in which countries and how many subscribers can be attributed to each of these operators. There are also extensive commentaries on the tables, in separate chapters on the Asia‐Pacific region, Africa, Europe, Latin America and the USA. (In fact the USA is treated in two chapters, on the domestic and international entanglements of the operators.) In addition the book has chapters describing the main mobile wireless standards and frequency allocations, especially those related to GSM and CDMA, and summarising industry restructuring between roughly 2003 and 2007. However, the book does not dwell on the corresponding international evolution of mobile network equipment suppliers, such as Alcatel‐Lucent and Nokia‐Siemens, or the extent to which these evolutions are responses to one another.

The authors state, and achieve, an intention to remain factual and avoid theorising. Inevitably a large collection of facts is likely to be dry and risks interesting only the dedicated specialist. Luckily the authors have a pleasant approach to arranging and commenting on their facts, which makes the book surprisingly readable.

The book introduces various indicators of international evolution. Most of these are quantitative measuremernts of presence and performance in countries. However, some are softer ones, such as “psychic dispersion”, based on factors like cultural and linguistic commonalities between a company and its markets.

These indicators suggest that, despite claims to the contrary, there are no true global operators, though there are many regional operators and some bi‐regional or tri‐regional ones: very few operators have significant stakes in more than two regions. Old patterns of colonisation leading to shared languages are still relevant to company interests abroad, and new patterns, such as oil wealth spilling from the Middle East into Africa, are also important.

Numbers like those in this book can be arduous to collect and even more arduous to validate. There are many numbers available through the World Wide Web, but their accuracy needs to be checked. Also, numbers may be accurate but inconsistent with one another, because they are based on different definitions of terms and different dates of assembly. In particular, they may use different, and unclear, definitions of “subscriber”: the definitions might include or exclude, for instance, SIM cards with allocated mobile phone numbers issued to dealers but not yet sold to customers. One operator may even use two definitions, depending on the purposes of the numbers. Different definitions of “subscriber” could make the numbers inconsistent with each other by a factor of two.The authors note these problems, and do not claim to have solved them completely; they have, however, adjusted for one source of inconsistency by weighting the subscriber numbers for each operator according to the equity stake held by the operator in the company providing service.

Though there are differences between how operators report themselves, the book tries to provide the same types of information for different regions of the world. Typically a chapter contains a table indicating which of several operators had stakes in certain countries at the end of 2007 and a table listing subscriber numbers for slightly more operators; for the Asia‐Pacific region, for instance, these tables show which of ten operators had stakes in which of 35 countries and how many subscribers each of 15 operators had across the region as a whole. However, the chapters on Europe and the USA are longer and more detailed; for example, the chapter on the USA describe the outcomes of particular spectrum auctions in some detail, though the book does not discuss auctions in other countries. Conversely, the chapter on Latin America focusses on just three operators, without considering national and international investments during the growth of the networks before 2004.

Uniformity can be difficult to achieve even within a chapter: again, taking the chapter on the Asia‐Pacific region as an example, one table provides data for both Telenor and Vimpelcom, but the other provides data for just Telenor, though in the region Telenor has mobile licences in five countries (and a large shareholding in Vimpelcom) and Vimpelcom has mobile licences in seven countries. (Russia, the home country of Vimplecom, is regarded as being in Europe, as is Turkey.)

The emphasis on historical data prevents some trends from being examined fully. Among these are the growing international investments by operators from the Middle East and from India. Also, because mobile network operators have been mainly concerned with telephony in the past, the book says little about the increasing interest of the mobile network operators in fixed networks, broadband and broadcasting.

The data might be superseded quite fast, especially as subscriber numbers keep rising. Indeed, the book is partly an update of earlier articles by the authors. To some extent it is protected from becoming out of date by its interest in questions of company ownership. With complicated shareholding arrangements, supervision by competition authorities, and litigation between industry participants, ownership takes years to change: at the time of writing this review, Vodafone still lacked control of Vodacom, Telefonica still had separate competing investments in Brazil, and Telenor still expected more court hearings against Altimo. However, there have also been developments that had not even started when the book was written, such as the dalliance between MTN and various companies about merging to cover India as well as Africa and the Middle East, and the proposal by Zain to sell its interests in Africa. Overall, publication of the data on the web, instead of on paper, might have served its purpose better.

That purpose is to make numerical comparisons between multinational mobile network operators across the world (or at least within separate regions of the world). The book is therefore largely limited to discussions of shareholdings and subscriber numbers; it does not discuss corporate strategies, for example, except as they relate directly to company ownership. The strategies therefore appear largely as opportunistic responses to asset disposals and licence offers. Readers seeking information on how operators constructed their networks or developed their markets will not find it in this book. However, readers wanting quantitative data about mobile networks, on which qualitative theories can be based, will be very well satisfied.