Mobile Broadband: a conceptual view

Last Friday I delivered a short presentation on the state of mobile broadband for Techlaw's annual Spring Conference. This time it was hosted by Houthoff Buruma in Amsterdam.

My top-down view went along these lines:

1. Mobile broadband in itself is a huge opportunity, as it expands on mobile's original proposotion (voice, mobility, personalized handsets).
2. At the same time, there are numerous threats - the same ones we know from the fixed-line world.
3. The industry has a broad choice of remedies, including 4G.
4. Recent signs (08Q1) are encouraging and I personally view LBS and social networking as 'killer apps' (in the consumer market).

Mobile Broadband

There is a lot going on in mobile broadband. I plan to cover that over the next few weeks. But first, off on hoilday for a week.

Some issues:

• Enablers: IP (i.e. 4G), VAS (such as LBS and payments for consumers, full access through laptop cards for workers), data tariffs coming down. Is the data over service revenues fianally taking off (settling above 20% at AT&T, Verizon and KPN)?
• Per IP: the Broadband Incentive Problem.
• MTA: comparing minutes of use in Europe and the US reveals that there is a lot of price elasticity.
• Fixed line replacement? (think 16d)
• Outsourcing, network sharing and separation to further lower costs.
• New entrants: Nokia, Apple, Google, Yahoo!
• Offloading (that's whta it is, no more!): mobile TV, femtocells.
• 4G Standards war: LTE, WiMAX (and Gaiacomm?).

Innovative mobile communication services

Innovation is coming to the mobile communications sector. Voice and SMS are not dead yet. This way, data revenues (other than SMS) will never make it past the 20% or so share of mobile service revenues ;-).

Virtual + real calling
Vodafone ('InsideOut') enables voice calling on and off Second Life. Telecom Italia's Second Life service is limited to on-net calling (between avatars). This functionality may spread, as Linden Lab is working on interoperability with IBM, in order to allow avatars to move into other virtual worlds.

Internet + mobile IM
Billed as micro-blogging service or as a Twitter look-alike, Jaiku is the newest Google annex. It extends into the mobile realm.

Email to SMS/IM
The latest Yahoo! Mail version added the possibility of sending messages to mobile phones (as an SMS) or to an IM service (Yahoo! or Live).

SMS + LBS
KPN launched olllo (with Heineken and MTV for advertising), a flirting service. It uses both SMS (for communication) and the callers' positions on the network (to find a victim) and obviously goes a little bit further than Sprint's 'friend finding' service, which uses GPS (so the pin-pointing is better, but it takes a GPS-enabled handset).

UPDATE (Oct. 11):
Of course I could have included SMS services from Google:

• In September, it applied for a patent related to paying by SMS (Safaricom of Kenya apparently also has a payment system based on SMS, as does KPN-subsidiary Base).
• Yesterday it launched Google SMS (queries by SMS for local info) in India.