Rants And Ramblings About Mobile Technology
Anders Borg writing about the fun and crazy world of mobile and Internet service technologies.
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Thursday, December 14, 2006
Apple starting MVNO
A loooong time ago (read: almost a year ago) Engadget mentioned that Apple might start an MVNO.
Apple To Introduce MVNO Wireless Service In ‘07, UBS Says indicates this is not so much a rumor anymore.
If Apple is to be at all successful with a family of mobile phones they will have to offer network services as well, so setting up an MVNO is not that far-fetched after all.
It's easy to guess that there will be a tight connection between this MVNO and iTunes, that now offers both music and videos, and also audio books etc would be handy for mobile phones. It's also fairly easy to guess that this MVNO will deploy flatrate for data. Otherwise the logic falls flat (no pun intended).
The note mentions a disparity between the amount of shops Apple has and that of Cingular etc. Maybe Apple will instead (or at least complement with...) sell phones via e-commerce sites, MySpace etc.
Another not so far-fetched guess is that phones will be provided with the iTunes service activated and with a music/video bundle ("download 100 songs for free" or something).
I'm not so worried about subsidizing of phones killing the iPod business, as after all subsidizing is not really subsidizing over time.
In any case, this is a tough market to conquer. Much tougher than the DAP market, as it existed yet was immature and with low consumer awareness at the time the iPod and iTunes were released. Hence, someone had to walk with the marketing torch, and Apple did.
Apple has to ride the data/information service wave (if there now is a big such wave) to win, providing all the neat things younger people need: high quality media downloads, blogging, IM, media sharing, mapping etc and with links in between, hence be more like Helio than a "cheap voice/SMS" MVNO. Commercial media downloads and ad-hoc media sharing will be an important thing to secure. iTunes uses DRM, and is likely to continue to also on the iPhone, despite the current discussions about DRM-free media downloads from other services.
They could of course start with not supporting downloading of multimedia at all, and just syncing with a PC, but that doesn't sound tempting enough for people to ditch their current DAPs and phones.
Apple To Introduce MVNO Wireless Service In ‘07, UBS Says indicates this is not so much a rumor anymore.
If Apple is to be at all successful with a family of mobile phones they will have to offer network services as well, so setting up an MVNO is not that far-fetched after all.
It's easy to guess that there will be a tight connection between this MVNO and iTunes, that now offers both music and videos, and also audio books etc would be handy for mobile phones. It's also fairly easy to guess that this MVNO will deploy flatrate for data. Otherwise the logic falls flat (no pun intended).
The note mentions a disparity between the amount of shops Apple has and that of Cingular etc. Maybe Apple will instead (or at least complement with...) sell phones via e-commerce sites, MySpace etc.
Another not so far-fetched guess is that phones will be provided with the iTunes service activated and with a music/video bundle ("download 100 songs for free" or something).
I'm not so worried about subsidizing of phones killing the iPod business, as after all subsidizing is not really subsidizing over time.
In any case, this is a tough market to conquer. Much tougher than the DAP market, as it existed yet was immature and with low consumer awareness at the time the iPod and iTunes were released. Hence, someone had to walk with the marketing torch, and Apple did.
Apple has to ride the data/information service wave (if there now is a big such wave) to win, providing all the neat things younger people need: high quality media downloads, blogging, IM, media sharing, mapping etc and with links in between, hence be more like Helio than a "cheap voice/SMS" MVNO. Commercial media downloads and ad-hoc media sharing will be an important thing to secure. iTunes uses DRM, and is likely to continue to also on the iPhone, despite the current discussions about DRM-free media downloads from other services.
They could of course start with not supporting downloading of multimedia at all, and just syncing with a PC, but that doesn't sound tempting enough for people to ditch their current DAPs and phones.
