• Today there are already 7.6 billion mobile subscriptions with only 5.2 billion subscribers. That means that, globally, the penetration rate for the entire population is 102 percent. In regions like Central and Eastern Europe, penetration rates have reached a staggering 143 percent of the population, while regions such as Africa (81 percent), India (88 percent), and China (97 percent) still have room to grow.

And it isn’t just that smartphone growth isn’t dead. Smartphone innovation isn’t dead, either.

I mean, yes, the Windows phone is now officially dead, but was it ever really alive? According to Q4 2016 numbers from Gartner, Android and iOS run 99.6 percent of new phones, with Blackberry dropping out of the mix and Windows sinking to 0.3 percent from its already-dismal 1.1 percent the year before. So nothing has really changed on that front.

But the Android and Apple devices are going to get slicker. The phones coming out of CES and MWC this year possessed hints of what is coming down the pike, from ever-more-complex AI to 10-nanometer chips to increased possibilities in the realms of AR and VR. And as we move toward 5G, the pace of innovation in smartphones should accelerate. 

So how can service providers continue to manage these devices, the enormous amounts of data they consume, and the changing expectations of their subscribers?

From Three Things to One: More Reasons to Embrace Data Analytics

There was an interesting article in Computerworld a few weeks ago by Mike Elgan. In it, he took Steve Jobs’ iPhone announcement, now a decade-old, and considered how Jobs’ declaration that this one device would be three things: iPod, mobile phone, and internet communication device — all in one.

Elgan rightly noted that those three things are no longer three disparate things. At the most, they are two, as a music player is just another app, particularly with the rise of streaming music and cloud storage.