SortedPC.net

In 2000 with the launch of WAP, the internet seemed set to go mobile. Eight years on we're still waiting (mostly) - why has its gestation been so protracted?

Early Days

I remember getting my first WAP phone, a Nokia 7110, in early 2000 and starting to browse the internet. Actually, at that time, it did seem pretty amazing and I quickly discovered the excellent kizoom mobile rail timetable site - which was an exemplar of how to organise a web site for mobile devices, especially phones.

To be frank, the experience didn't live up to the enthusiastic blurb on the Nokia website: "...the display is BIG. It's also sharp, with 65 rows of 96 pixels, so it can show large and small fonts, bold or regular, as well as full graphics. Great for services, messages and icons, even better for games." I love the use of the description 'full graphics' to describe an interface that produced grainy black and white images that even required their own special picture format, WBMP, because it was quite incapable of displaying even the simplest GIF images. At 14.4kbps, the internal GSM modem (this was before any form of packet-switched wireless) should have been fast enough, given the low data transfer overhead, but browsing was painfully slow. Even e-mail over WAP, which in 1999 I saw as the deathknell of SMS, didn't really work.

The Mysterious Non-death of SMS

In those pre-Blackberry days, you had to poll a POP3 e-mail server, like dial-up internet, and wait for messages to download - also, entering and managing e-mail addresses was a pain. In contrast, SMS overcame both these limitations neatly - delivery was 'push' and your contacts' phone numbers were all you needed for addressing. Even today, with the advent of the Blackberry and much better phones (typically automatically synchronising contacts with PCs using Bluetooth), more than three billion SMS messages are sent each day worldwide. In contrast, there are 8 million Blackberry subscribers whose total e-mail traffic, even combined with that through other devices and mobiles, is dwarfed by SMS traffic. Moreover, what's really lost the battle with SMS for mobile e-mail is not limitations in functionality or performance, but that it's passé, as Michael Fitzpatrick explained in a recent Guardian article.

Better Late than Never - 3G

Nonetheless, there has been a revolution in the usability of the mobile web in the last few years, especially the last eighteen months. In 2003, 3rd generation (3G) cellular mobile telephony services started in the UK and Italy. By the middle of 2007, approximately 20% of European subscribers were using 3G services (although precisely which services count as '3G' is open to debate). The principal advantages of 3G are that it supports a greater number of simultaneous voice and data connections within the same bandwidth and, most relevant to the mobile web, higher data rates (384 kbit/s for standard UMTS - the specific 3G technology used in Europe and widely elsewhere - and up to 14.4 Mbit/s for UMTS enhanced by HSDPA). This has revolutionised the browsing experience on mobile phones and PDAs, so much so that the Apple iPhone (which is not yet available on 3G networks) has been slated for the slowness of its browsing experience, notwithstanding its outstanding user interface.

The Less Imperfect Thing

When Steve Jobs stood up at MacWorld 2007 and, with characteristic virtuositi, presented the iPhone inter alia, it was clear that the mobile web was about to be transformed. The iPhone has Apple's characteristically elegant, intuitive and uncomplicated user interface all presented on a large touch screen that makes mobile browsing a pleasure (were it not for the speed of web retrieval on an EDGE - or 2.75G - circuit with a theoretical peak data rate of 144 kbits/s). That said, there's little doubt that Apple's promotion of the iPhone as a realistic browsing device is one factor that will drive increased use of the mobile web and the delivery of applications optimised for it. Nokia's N95 was the best kept mobile secret of 2006, until the iPhone started to be benchmarked against it. In fact the N95 has some significant advantages over the iPhone (GPS, 3G and a 5 megapixel camera - the iPhone's is 2 megapixel). Moreover, Nokia had, by November 2007, sold over 1M N95s, against reports of disappointing, but unspecified, iPhone sales. As Wired magazine explained in The Untold Story: How the iPhone Blew Up the Wireless Industry, the real change that the iPhone and N95 are forcing is the abandonment of the so-called "walled gardens"- in which the network operators have controlled access to selected content for their users - in favour of off-portal (or off-deck in US parlance) access to all web content by all subscribers (although adult content remains a tricky issue).

Letting Go

The mobile industry has had obscure tariff and price structures since inception, of which the most obvious manifestation has been the network operators' subsidies to consumers on handset cost in return for longer contract commitment - a practice that has been the subject of several competition investigations. This practice and others, such as the high costs of international roaming, are driven by the operators' perceived need to defend the high connection and call charges that made them so profitable in the 1990s and drove the 3G spectrum auctions in 2000. The need to recoup the £22.5bn paid in the UK auction and the £30bn paid in the German auction have driven the operators to pursue high data tariffs since 2000. It took until late 2006, when 3 became the first UK operator to introduce effectively unmetered internet access (subject to fair use limit) for a fixed monthly fee. Since then, T-Mobile, Orange and Vodafone have introduced similar tariffs, as have AT&T and Verizon in the USA. 3 has even embraced Skype with the introduction of the 3 Skypephone - the first time a mobile network operator has danced with the devil of internet telephony (or VoIP) which, with free calls (national or international) between internet phones, was long seen as the sworn enemy of all telecoms companies.

Where's the Money?

Does all of this mean that, finally, the mobile internet is ready to take off? According to Bango, the Cambridge UK based leader in mobile payments, the answer is "Yes!". Certainly, the barriers to mobile web usage, both practical (device and network functionality) and financial (tariffs) have been significantly reduced. Mobile, as Bango points out, has some aces up its sleeve, including the ability to charge for goods and services through the consumer's phone bill or prepay. However, Bango also suggests that mobile advertising is about to come of age. Which leads the mobile web back to the same dilemma as the fixed web - can an all-advertising business model really work? Facebook took a bloody nose over its Beacon focused advertising program last autumn, as I blogged in December. In contrast Zyb, offering free backup for your mobile contacts and calendar data and positioning itself as the pioneer of mobile social networking, is currently advertising-free. But I wonder how it successful it will be in developing a money-making business model when it introduces its, as yet unspecified, paid-for services in "the next couple of months"?

14 January 2008

Trackback URL for this post: