I was at MEX last week - two days immersed in mobile issues. No matter which way you looked at it, phone OEMs, 3rd party developers, network operators and OS vendors still aren’t working well together. There’s so much more that could be done to improve the user experience, provide universal cross-phone/network facilities and encourage users to take up advanced data services - but this usually involves universal collaboration and companies (particularly network operators) relinquishing some control of the consumer.

The corollary of this is that mobile business models that rely on the involvement of many business partners (and particularly network operators) tend to be very risky. In fact, the more successful projects I have been involved with have had a narrow business and technical focus.

When I spoke to people at MEX about this, several things came up that may, in the longer term, disrupt the current network operator dominance…

• Declining voice revenue due to less and cheaper voice calls (already happening).
• Paypal is currently gearing up to release a European (as opposed to just US and UK) mobile payment mechanism. A universal trusted payment mechanism that bypasses the current excessive (to some people prohibitive) network operator premium SMS commission would open up the possibilities of selling content off-portal.
• Various future incarnations of WiFi and devices could make us less dependent on the network operator and in an extreme case even cut them out of the loop completely.

Obviously, market forces should prevail and a more balanced scenario should evolve.

This entry was posted on Monday, May 7th, 2007 at 7:17 pm and is filed under Mobile, Network Operators. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.