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EDN Europe's Editor Graham Prophet posts a selection of comments and insights prompted by the many items of industry news and rumour that cross the editorial desk or are gathered on his frequent travels to interviews, press conferences and events around Europe - and further afield - and somehow never find their way to the magazine or the web site, recovering some of the information otherwise lost in the noise level...

Thursday, July 23, 2009

The emperor’s new wireless service offering

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I received an email solicitation to attend a Webinar on the subject of “Mobile Internet Data: Hype Colliding with Reality”. It is being conducted by one Andrew Odlyzko, who, the email tells me, is a Professor at the University of Minnesota. “He had a long career in research and research management at Bell Labs and AT&T Labs….. He is known for the debunking of the myth of Internet traffic doubling every three or four months and for demonstrating that connectivity has traditionally mattered much more for society than content.”

I’ve not come across Prof. Odlyzko before, but I like him already, and that’s without listening to his Webinar (which I won’t be doing as I don’t have the requisite $195 to hand). Why? The brief on the content of his presentation seems to me to collect in one place more sense on trends in mobile comms than I’ve come across for quite a while. I’ll quote it unaltered;

“A wide consensus holds that mobile data will lead to the next telecom revolution. The volume of data transmitted over wireless is skyrocketing, growing at rates that are almost surely unsustainable. This is in contrast to wireline data volumes, which are growing vigorously, but at a sufficiently slow rate that capex does not need to grow to accommodate them. However, this growth in mobile data is not accompanied by a similar willingness to pay. The implications for technologies and business models of wireless carriers will be explored.
Key points to be highlighted:
*Wireline traffic growing at about 50% per year, can be accommodated with current capex
*Wireless traffic growing at over 100% per year, far faster than technology is progressing
*Low willingness to pay for mobile data
*Voice is a cash cow and likely to remain so
*Wireless service providers have incentives to use kludgy technology solutions to protect the voice cash cow
*Seemless (sic) mobility between wireline and wireless is not achievable
*Strong tension between incentives to build walled gardens and ones to encourage innovation.”

Unquote. I’m not sure what that last one is all about, I guess a “walled garden” is a closed product-offering from a single supplier that exploits a pre-determined technology mix, and discourages constantly experimenting with new add-ons. But if you want to know, the link to register for the event is here.

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