This year’s Mobile World Congress, the show formerly known as 3GSM World Congress, has embraced “radio agnosticism” as a way to push mobile technologies of all kinds forward - including CDMA, WiMax, Long Term Evolution (LTE) among others.
In town covering the show for Streaming Media (www.streamingmedia.com), I stopped by the Vodafone store closest to the Fira, to check on why my Vodafone chip from Italy wasn’t working in Spain. The very helpful attendant first said my phone, purchased in Switzerland in 2006, didn’t work on Vodafone’s Spanish network.
A Vodafone is a Vodafone is a Vodafone
Turns out it wasn’t the phone, or that I’d not registered on Vodafone’s network - had tried that before looking for a store - or even that I was using a phone that was two years old (try carting a clunky Motorola to a trade show dinner with Nokia, where N95 and E71 handsets abound, although I did score with the multi-hinged Samsung I carry in my back pocket by habit even when I’m not in a country with Verizon coverage - err, every country except the United States).
Turns out I needed to buy a new SIM chip since I’d not used any of my minutes in the last year, which meant I was going to pay Euros 24 for the ability to text a colleague who had picked up my apartment key. Since I’d exhausted all other means of connecting, including texting from “free SMS” pages and sending emails, and it was 8:30 PM (30 hours since I’d slept horizontally), it was worth expense.
While I waited for my turn at the Vodafone store, I had a chance to look at the new HSDPA modems, glance at the touch-sensitive phones and look over service plans. It struck me that two of three issues holding back universal connectivity are about ready to be addressed.
The first is a consistent universal platform for voice and data connectivity. The recent decisions by Verizon, AT&T and many other wireless carriers to adopt LTE - and the move to include WiMax as a portion of LTE’s growth - put this possibility into play within the nex three years.
The second, announced as part of European Commission’s Commissioner of Telecommunications presentation at Mobile World Congress, is an end to egregious data roaming charges. While the iPhone’s move into cutting data into flat-rate pricing may have been partly on Viviane Reding’s mind as she warned mobile operators to fix excessive data roaming charges in the same way they fixed mobile voice charges - or risk having the roaming charge reductions forced up on them - the deadline of June 2008 can’t come soon enough. For Europe to gain the benefits of its union when it comes to easily moving between countries and still doing business at a reasonable cost, data roaming charges, and flat-rate data services for that matter, desperately need modernization.
The third area still outstanding - global data and roaming service agreements at a reasonable cost - may be addressed by external market forces as large conglomerates such as Telefonica, Vodafone, 3 and others find customer demand equal-price roaming across group countries. A move like this could have just as much bearing on the business strategies of small- and medium-size businesses as flat-rate intranational mobile voice pricing and services such as Vonage has had on trade between Europe and the US.
No comments:
Post a Comment