Opinionated comments on mobile phone industry news

Another "operators hinder market development" kind of piece. This time from ZDNet called Google: mobile operators want to block our apps.

My spin on this is (as before) that operators want to hinder others from offering information services that operators anyway don't and won't offer themselves.

Most service innovation is done outside of operators and those services are what users want to get access to, but again, what are operators afraid of? That they will get too much revenue from mobile data (we are talking Google Maps here: lots of nice data traffic), and that their billing systems and/or the network will crash?

Or is it a branding war? Operators being afraid their value will be diluted by much stronger service brands (which is a fact)? In the long term no one will care who provides the bit pipe, so obviously this is something for operators to fear.

Both US and European operators should take a hard look at DoCoMo's i-mode. It's been around for over 7 years, yet we don't seem to have learned from them. Maybe 3 has, but few others.

There was a discussion a week ago about operators feeling that 3G was not optimized for IM, and could even fold if too many chatted. That's reverse and nonconstructive thinking. What operators should think is "It's our task and responsibility to provide the best data access possible, so we need to optimize our networks, whatever technology acronyms we are currently using, so that any IP-based traffic works the best way possible. We shall also offer attractive and easy to deploy billing services to third-party. That way we'll get lots more revenue from mobile data.". Maybe I should make this into a plaque...

Do you disagree?

(via Mobility Weblog)