A research firm released a report predicting that voice services revenues generated in the Asia-Pacific will drop to US$176 billion in 2015. The current figure is $US182 billion. Industry analysts say that the probable drop is a "trend driven by falling ARPU in competitive markets, outweighing overall growth in connections and minutes of use."

However, Ovum said that predictions on the country level are patchy. David Kennedy, the company's AP research director says that he sees "rapid mobile voice revenue declines" in developed markets such as Australia, Japan, Hong Kong and South Korea. This is in spite of continued growth in mobile voice revenues in India, Indonesia and China.

Kennedy further predicts significant growth in revenues from mobile data services, saying that the figure will increase to US$133 billion in 2015 from $US84 million this year.

"We foresee both rising data connections and data rising ARPU as more consumers in Asia-Pacific opt to use more text, email, social media and video on their mobiles. Overall, we expect total Asia-Pacific mobile revenues to increase only from US$267 billion in 2010 to US$310 billion in 2015, " Kennedy said.

His firm also foresees an increase in total connections, from 2.6 billion to 3.8 billion over the period.