Many of these services have increased the revenue per customer for the carriers. Focusing on a growing consumer demand for speed and convenience, companies are offering a variety of products and services including wireless capability and prepaid phonecards. The Internet is playing an increasing role in the consumer's life, whether it be for personal or business use. E-mail on the Internet has shifted from a novelty to competing directly with telephone voice service and the US mail. Long distance carriers are even exploring crossover services like allowing an Internet chat room participant to automatically dial the person they are conversing with through the keyboard and shift to a voice conversation.
Consumers are willing to pay for the products and services that meet their needs.
Competition will continue to reduce prices making these technologies more attractive to all consumers. This report combines primary and secondary research to achieve greater insight into trends and market sizes than is possible with any one type of data. The primary research consisted of interviews with regulators, industry players, and academicians, as well as Insight's proprietary survey of 1018 randomly selected consumers. Secondary research was based on information from regulators, government agencies as well as electronic and non-electronic searches of articles from newspapers and trade journals, Internet searches, research reports from a number of securities houses, and attendance at conferences and trade shows. This model is based on sets of equations that balance market supply and demand for different sectors of the consumer markets.