Mr. CELLCO, TEAR DOWN THIS WALL!
OK, so what drove me to paraphrasing Ronald Reagan? Businessweek/Blogspotting tech reporter and blogger Stephen Baker, with co-author Heather Green, had a timely post on the state of today's wireless walled content gardens, that he later turned into a lengthier article for Businessweek Online.
It outlined some numbers on the declining growth for the walled content gardens of the wireless carriers. Specifically, he points out that:
Since January, according to M:Metrics, Inc. of Seattle, the number of Americans using a mobile browser for news and other information appears to be falling.
The numbers:January -- 22,052,550 0
February-- 22,628,052 2.6%
March -- 21,533,717 -4.8%
April -- 22,109,802 2.7%
May -- 21,641,574 -2.1%
Both the pieces are worth looking at, and highlight a trend that has been long coming: the eventual opening up of today and tomorrow's wireless access networks to content and data communications from anybody, to anybody, to anyone's device...just like today's wired broadband networks.
As I touched on in a post titled "Broadband to go" in March,
In a world where every wireless carrier here and abroad is scrambling to build out their wireless networks, we're not far from a time when horizontal competition amongst networks starts offering true choice in devices that have wireless broadband ubiquity.
Just like Wi-fi has been built into almost every conceivable device in the last 3-5 years, wireless broadband, be it of the carriers' EV-DO, or 3G flavors, or from altogether different competing technologies like Wimax are likely to force the market to open up the networks to all device comers.
Once we have that landscape, and it's likely only 2-3 years away, then we will start to see a plethora of devices that offer mobile Internet connectivity and VOIP Internet telephony.
In that world, Apple could introduce an iPod with a phone/PDA on their own, rather than through partnerships with hand-set manufacturers like Motorola (Can you say "higher margins"?).
In that world, a Dell or a Sony could provide a myriad of devices that offer choice of wireless data carriers, much like how PC companies offered a choice of Internet Service Providers in the nineties.
To remember just how crazy that got, take a road down memory lane with this article from CNET.
Try as they might, the wireless carriers will eventually realize that what they dread the most, becoming "just dumb pipes", is actually the smartest strategy for the one that realizes it and executes on it first. Typically it's not the number one or two player in an oligopoly, but someone lower down the list.
It's in that vein that we're seeing the apparent "explosion" of companies in many disparate industries like Disney and Cablevision "suddenly" enter the wireless service business in recent months, with the help of oligopoly rebel Sprint. This article from Telecommunications Online provides some background to Sprint's motivations and recent actions.
It's called being an MVNO (mobile virtual network operator). Wireless maven Russell Beattie has a great post on this at his site, that you should check out. Russell also points to an IDC study that calls for greater MVNO growth in Europe. Om Malik is less sanguine about MVNOs in his post here.
I'm probably closer to Om's view on the mainstream success of most of the MVNOs, primarily because most of them seem to be designed as mini-walled gardens themselves. They're mostly corporate vanity wireless brands. We'll see if a few them see large, mainstream adoption.
In any case, the snowball has started to roll down the hill...and it's only going to get bigger. The days of wireless walled gardens are numbered.
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