In Today’s Issue:
Nobody wants landlines; Apple zaps apps, caps AppStore competitors,
Winer flaps; Open Hack Day@Yahoo!; implementation of sci-fi dystopia
for the iPhone; Vodafone deckchair redeployment; T-Mobile Android
phone; C&W builds non-virtual GSM operator for Tesco; free airtime for ad viewers, human or not; attack of the terminators; 3UK says no; KPN-Bouygues MVNO deal; the Internet interprets America as damage and routes around it; screen-scanning check-in; warrants needed for LBS snooping
A sign of the times: David Isenberg points out
that the University of Kentucky has stopped providing fixed phone lines
in the halls of residence, as nobody wants them. And before mobile
operators start to gloat, don’t think those same students will forever
tolerate voice and messaging services that in no way integrate with the
rest of their online lives. Where are the voice and messaging
applications of the future?
Perhaps not on the iPhone, whatever Apple says. Blog legend Dave Winer
says you can’t trust them not to kill your application. If you want to
market something through the App Store, it has to be approved in
advance by Apple. And as usual, once you start censoring for one
reason, pretty soon you find all kinds of others:
Yesterday it came out that they rejected an app called
Podcaster because it competed with iTunes, an Apple product. Maybe it
was better than iTunes in some way, or simpler, more focused, had
features iTunes didn’t have? It doesn’t matter, it illustrates exactly
why Apple shouldn’t assume this power, or if they insisit on it, you’d
have to be crazy to develop iPhone apps.
Consider this possibility. Next year Apple announces an app that does
what your previously authorized iPhone app does. You have competition,
so another competitor, even if it is the platform vendor, isn’t that
big a deal, right? Well what if they de-authorize your app because it
duplicates functionality of theirs? Think you could live with that?
Read the whole thing. Now that the 3G iPhone is actually subsidised,
as well as subject to revenue sharing, by the mobile operators, well…
you have to worry. iPhone developer Fraser Speirs
agrees. This whole saga is a foretaste of the upcoming tension in the
telco business model: partners will want to integrate with core voice
and messaging network elements, and this same process places them in a
position to compete with those core services. Embrace, extend,
extinguish — a well trodden path.
Compare, if you will, Open Hack Day
over at Yahoo! They are busy bringing on as many new ideas as they can
manage. Mind you, some people aren’t put off by Apple’s heavy-handed
approach; here’s an implementation of augmented reality for the iPhone. And you thought reality was bad enough without huge green porn-spider avatars lurching around street corners.
Vodafone, meanwhile, spent the week reorganising;
the Europe, Middle East, Asia Pacific and Africa division, which
despite its name didn’t include France, is being split up, the Verizon
Wireless holding put directly under the CEO, and
a new job of “Strategy and Business Improvement Director” created. That
would make finance chief Andy Halford about the last survivor of the
men who were the Newbury Gang.
T-Mobile USA may be launching the first Google Android device in a few days’ time.
There are better things we could all be doing; and here’s one of them. C&W buys a gaggle of Ericsson GSM gear; apparently to build Tesco its very own private mobile network. Not to be confused with Tesco Mobile, the O2-fuelled MVNO. This is going to make use of a sliver of low power 1800MHz spectrum OFCOM sold
last year in order to run an internal, fixed-mobile convergence/unified
comms system for the supermarket’s 400,000 employees. We also wonder
how many non-human customers it might have.
Surely this
is crying out for a non-human solution. Cellcom in Israel is offering
free airtime to people willing to watch adverts. How long before
someone thinks of a way to have a machine watch the adverts, and
collect the free minutes? (Remember, people absolutely love free phone
calls.)
Meanwhile, a whole gaggle of European incumbent GSM operators
joined Vodafone in pushing the line that a cap on termination fees
would lead to the mass abandonment of mobile telephony, anarchy, street
riots etc. 3UK CEO Kevin Russell disagrees
(as it’s very much in his interest to do); he says that the true cost
of termination is low enough that there would be no need to charge for
inbound calls. His prepaid mobile broadband service, it seems, has
attracted the flattery of imitation in the US — Cricket is now offering prepaid EV-DO Internet service.
Whilst this goes on, KPN is buying MVNO capacity from Bouygues. We shall see what’s developing here, but it looks a lot like a cross-European virtual operator of some sort.
The New York Times reports that Internet traffic is beginning to avoid the US;
the increasing diversity of submarine and overland cables, more
Asia-Europe capacity, the proliferation of local Internet exchange
points, and increasing political dread are cited as reasons. Read the
whole thing; they interviewed a full house of the right people,
including Andrew Odlyzko, k c claffy, and Earl Zmijewski of Renesys. (Renesys’s report on post-Hurricane Ike outages is here.)
Here’s a nice, enterprisey, low-bandwidth, high-value service:
get your airline boarding pass sent to you as a QR barcode which the
airline staff scan off your screen (neatly circumventing the possible
Bluetooth etc security risks). Of course, there’s no mention of a telco
being involved. (Does anyone still think upping the size of your minute
bucket for Christmas and slashing your prices constitutes a business
strategy? If so, click here urgently.)
And finally, a US judge has ruled that the police do indeed need a warrant for mobile location data. How quaint!
This Blog is republished from
www.Telco2.net/blog.
The Telco 2.0 Initiative is a new industry program focused on helping
with this thorny question: "How do we (telcos, handset manufacturers,
Media companies, IT players, NEPs, etc) make money in an IP-based
world?"
Posted
Sep 15 2008, 12:45 AM
by
Telco 2.0