I think the idea of 24 of the world’s largest mobile phone operators coming together to ‘make it easier to sell and distribute mobile phone apps’ is laughable. This is what’s being announced today at a huge mobile trade show in Barcelona.
Apparently the mobile phone networks fear that at the moment they are in danger of becoming little more than “dumb pipes in the air”, with all the revenues created by applications going to software developers and the companies that operate the stores that supply them.
Well here’s news, mobile network operators — I would like NOTHING MORE than for you to be dumb pipes. Which shouldn’t be a problem because THAT’S WHAT YOU ARE! I want you to act in the same way I want all my other utilities — water, sewage, gas — to act. Like great, big literal dumb pipes. Subservient conduits. Enslaved vessels. I don’t ask British Gas to get together with all the other gas companies and brainstorm new hot dinner ideas I might want to try out. You know, using their GAS and all? No, I’ll rely on trained chefs, food writers and my vast collection of suspiciously cleanly-paged cookbooks for that. Specialists, in other words. Just you keep the gas coming, guys. In fact I’m not even sure British Gas are the people who supply my gas — THAT’S how little I care about my gas utility supplier.
Your problem, mobile network operators, is you think you’re better than that. You want us to love you. You want us to wonder what we’d do without you. But I mean, to continue the utilities analogy, it’s not like you even manufacture the porcelain toilet, or the brushed steel taps, that connect to the dumb pipes. Nope, you just take care of all that stuff sloshing about inside them, the stuff everyone takes for granted. I really don’t want Thames Water forming coalitions with other water companies to provide me with new and improved cocktail ideas, that I could make using, you know, the water they send to my house. No thanks, fellas, just keep the wet stuff coming, though, you’re doing a great job.
But the mobile operators don’t really care about their customers. They’re just worried about their profits, and how they’ll steadily lose them to every innovative company that encroaches into their tradtional space. Customers have literally zero loyalty to any of their carefully nurtured and obviously humanised brands. People are interested in technology and functionality, which are provided by the handset manufacturers and the software developers respectively. Those two groups are both also driven by profit, but, importantly, their mission is to deliver better technology and functionality than their rivals. Mobile operators, on the other hand, offer a binary proposition — you can either telephone, SMS or get on the web, or you can’t. Not a hard job, youd have thought.
Worse still, the mobile operators got themselves into this mess in the first place by offering their customers closed systems and restricted access; they attempted to own content and access to content through walled-garden web access. Their very offering relies on restriction and artificial handicapping, as they attempt to categorise and upsell customers into various arbitrary packages, the difference in whose actual cost is negligible. Mobile phone operators have a target figure they aim to extract from each customer every month. The actual makeup of the services and products they offer is virtually meaningless. So they have no one but themselves to blame when customers eagerly jump ship in favour of unlimited data access, real web access and a semblance of choice in what you do with your mobile.
Mobile phone operators have repeatedly show themselves to be unimaginative, exploitative, moneygrabbing corporate behemoths with no real understanding the mobile data world. I don’t see that changing any time soon.
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This post was mentioned on Twitter by paulcarvill: Blogpost: Mobile network operators ARE just dumb pipes in the sky: http://bit.ly/bJvvvb...
Unfortunately they can’t afford to change. We consumers put a very low price on mobile data, but it costs massive amount to provide it. Operators are close to capacity in their radio access networks, councils won’t allow them to build more cell sites, yet we demand complete mobility (for voice, for email, for streaming video). Mobile data has been a massive success for them, almost unexpectedly, unfortunately their really is a shortfall in the technical ability to deliver as much bandwidth as we want.
Now as much as we want to think they are squabbling over content rights, exclusivity and developing the next big thing, what is providing revenues now (mobile data in various forms) is unsustainable. The networks are fit to burst.