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Double-counting and half-counting mobile broadband
I'm up into my neck in a spreadsheet model of mobile broadband adoption & device usage at the moment.
An interesting paradox is currently bending my mind:
- some mobile broadband subscriptions will be "double-counted". One subscription might cover multiple devices, particularly for non-SIM technologies like Mobile WiMAX. So one individual user might have a single WiMAX "account", but have 2 or 3 separate devices permitted to use it (eg laptop + personal media player + in-car system) . A similar scenario might be people who SIM-swap between multiple devices, or share a 3G USB modem or mobile-backhauled local router.
- some other mobile broadband subscriptions will be "half-counted". One device might have access to multiple network accounts or technologies. So a laptop might have embedded WiMAX, plus an HSPA modem. Or a single operator may operate multiple network technologies, and use 802.21 in the connection software, to attach the device to whichever is available at a given location.
The easy option is to design the model to ignore these effects, and assume they're just minor or will cancel each other out. But the current roughly 30% mismatch between cellular user & subscriber data suggests that's an oversimplification too far.
Edit: The more I think about this, the more complex it gets. One of the other issues is going to be the possibility to get "ad hoc" access to WiMAX, and maybe even HSPA/LTE in the future, in the same sort of way that you can get one-off access to WiFi hotspots. If I go on a trip to 5 countries with a mobile-enabled laptop, and sign up for 2 days' WiMAX with local providers in each place - or buy a local prepay data SIM for HSPA - does that count as 5 "subscriptions"?
One thing's for sure... we're all going to have to be very wary of reported statistics on mobile broadband. I've just realised I've already got 4 subs myself - a 3 HSDPA dongle, a 3 prepay SIM in a smartphone, a new HSDPA featurephone with flatrate data on O2, and a T-Mobile 3G SIM which is actually in a 2G device.
Edit 2: No, I've got 5 subs. I forgot I'd been given another temporary week-long HSDPA modem & SIM in February by the GSMA in Barcelona. Although that one may no longer be counted as "active" depending on Telefonica's definition of churn.... See what I mean about the stats?
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Mobile Wallet? Whose money is it?
My brother works for a large investment bank & spends a lot of time thinking about the finer details of various financial instruments.
He raised an interesting issue, specifically about London's Oyster card (stored-value card for Tube & Bus travel), but I'm wondering if it applies generically to mobile payments as well.
It's a simple question which is surprisingly difficult to answer: Does the money on a stored-value card belong to the user, or the provider? If Transport for London (in the Oyster example) or a mobile operator (for a mobile wallet or even prepay credit) goes bust, can you get the money back? Or are you at the back of a long list of other creditors? Related to this is what happens if the phone or card breaks.
Given the huge % of the world that uses prepay accounts for mobile - and presumably given that operators will want to avoid credit risk for postpaid users with mobile wallets in future - this is far from an academic question. I've seen some estimates recently that suggest $10's of billions may get spent annually on mobile payments with NFC.
At that level, it's certainly relevant to ask who it belongs to, and what happens when things go wrong. Let's face it, given recent events it seems that normal banks aren't as safe as we used to think - so would you trust a mobile operator to give you better protection for your cash deposits?
(Incidentally - my brother tried to get an answer about Oyster credit, but eventually gave up. He couldn't even find someone who understood the question).
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Great article on Web vs. Native mobile apps
I'd heartily recommend reading this post by David Wood (of Symbian, so not exactly unbiased, but very even-handed on this topic). It looks at the very hot topic of whether mobile app development will avoid the headaches of fragmentation and operator lock-downs, and just migrate to the Web and cool AJAX-type tools instead.
My view is similar to David's - for many applications, Mobile Web will be the way to go, for ease of development, cross-platform support, rapid update and so on.
But for some the most important and demanding applications, there will still be a need for native development, even if it comes with a dose of pain.
The same is true on the PC - most things work fine in the browser. But for Skype or anti-virus or serious corporate applications, there's advantages to being able to write the most efficient, powerful, complex code to the native platform if you're capable of doing so.
I'm sure the balance between outright optimisation and convenience will shift over time, and across different application categories and networks. But there isn't "one answer", and developers and service providers will need to work out ways to blend the two paradigms.
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A mischievous suggestion - how about a WiMAX/UMB hybrid?
I see that Sprint has left the NGMN (Next Gen Mobile Networks) consortium in something of a huff, after that organisation endorsed LTE as "the answer" for 4G, leaving WiMAX on the table despite scrutinising it for a long time.
To be honest, NGMN's "inclusive" policy of other networks always struck me as a thinly veiled stick with which to prod Ericsson, NSN et al into a more benign IPR and interoperability direction.
So, in the spirit of end-of-the week "What if......?" thinking, I'm speculating about a possible next step. NGMN's other jilted lover is Qualcomm's CDMA-UMB, which is now looking almost completely friendless.
So.... how about a WiMAX / LTE hybrid? Could Intel and Qualcomm bury the hatchet and play nicely together?
What if... Sprint got together with KDDI in Japan (also a CDMA / WiMAX operator) , and locked the 2 silicon companies in a room together with representatives from CDG and the WiMAX Forum, and told them to turn UMB into WiMAX's FDD profile? And make it all neatly backward-compatible & roam-able with EVDO? It might even tempt the Koreans back to the CDMA camp.....
Yes, I know it's probably not practical on technological, commercial or political grounds. But it's fun to speculate anyway.......
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HSUPA stalling?
I've been looking at some of the data on HSUPA deployments, and frankly it's a bit disappointing. There was a news article yesterday quoting Qualcomm saying "This is the year for HSUPA" and "it's now being included as standard for chipsets aimed at 'mid range' devices and by the end of the year will appear as standard on low end phones as well".
To me, that last comment rang alarm bells - it sounds like a marketing pitch "Hey, everyone! HSUPA's the next must-have! Get involved! No, really, everyone's gonna be doing it! Honest....."
Normally that sort of pitch is made when something isn't happening. "Standard on low end phones"...er, well given that WCDMA still isn't standard on low-end devices, I'd be pretty surprised if the world's $30 handsets suddenly skipped straight over HSDPA and went all the way to full HSUPA from GSM.
In fact, there's still a real dearth of HSUPA phones. Although there are 60-odd devices in total, most are modems, dongles, modules & other non-phone products. There's a handful of Toshiba phones in Japan, and some high-end Windows devices from HTC, I-Mate and a couple of other vendors. There are no high-end Nokias with high-speed uplink yet (including the new N96), the iPhone is HSDPA not HSUPA and so on.
So clearly, there's some level of desperate hyperbole.... but the question is how much? Looking at the GSA's statistics for deployments and "commitments", it seems that the wheels have come off the "Uplink" bandwagon a bit. While 51 HSUPA networks have launched, there's only another 17 known to be "committed". Yes, the number of live networks has almost doubled in 6 months, but the future rollout schedule hasn't kept pace. Looking back at some statistics for HSDPA from 2006, when it reached 50 deployments, there was a pipeline of 60+ on the way.
Now don't get me wrong, I'm all in favour of HSUPA. It's one of the things that makes VoIPo3G much more practical. But I suspect that it's that, coupled with the risks of P2P traffic or people running PC's as web servers over the mobile network, that are leading operators to avoid specifying UPA as a must-have. They'd rather have faster generations of HSDPA, or support for different frequency bands like 900MHz. Despite some of the blather about social networking, there isn't really a killer revenue-generating app for HSUPA services outside of a few road warriors and photographers needing to upload big image & presentation files from PCs. I'm not convinced operators really want to host billions of uncompressed 5MP cameraphone images on their networks, even if the radio network can support it.
I have a suspicion that most operators will probably wait for HSPA+ / HSPA-Evolved before upgrading their uplink, particular for handset users. There will be a slow creep of HSUPA into 3G dongle modems for those markets where shipments have exploded, and you'll start see smartphones gradually coming into the market at end-2008, but you can forget about truly massmarket HSUPA phones until late 2009 or early 2010.
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