With the Arrival of 3G Networks, What More Can Mobile Operators Do?

Over the course of time, I’ve had the opportunity to speak with mobile operators who have either invested millions or are about to invest millions of dollars in the development of 3G networks. Amidst the discussions with them a question still looms in my mind: What can our 3G network subscribers do now, and where/how can we make more money from our subscribers? In the quest for the answer, I started researching, using Google.com – using keywords such as “3G applications”— and, to my dismay, found the first 100 search results disappointing. That’s why I decided to write this piece myself; hoping it will answer many of the questions that continually arise. For example: What can we do with 3G now besides selling a 3G enabled Apple iPhone?

Let’s take a closer look at the following questions:
- Is 3G everywhere?
- What is 3G anyway?
- What are the most commonly mentioned applications of 3G?
- Which 3G applications can Mobile Operators deploy today?

Is 3G Everywhere?

There has been a lot of talk about 3G investments in Europe and the US which inevitably resulted in a near ubiquitous 3G adoption. As I was researching for this article, I stumbled across the fact that China Unicom announced that it plans to spend $14.5B on a 3G network infrastructure (http://www.theregister.co.uk/). According to articles by my friend, Om Malik, on Gigaom.com, India appears to be prepping for 3G wireless broadband, with the government all set to start selling 3G licenses. In Asia, SingTel lead the way as the first to deploy 3G in 2005. According to Cellular-news.com , the CDMA Development Group (CDG) announced that, as of Q1 2008, Indonesia had more than 16.3 million CDMA2000/3G subscribers – putting them in the lead in Southeast Asia for 3G CDMA subscriber growth. So, the bottom line is that 3G is a solid presence in most of the developed world and will be available in all emerging countries within the next couple of years.

What is 3G anyway?

According to Wikipedia, 3G is the third generation of mobile phone standards and technology, superseding 2G, and preceding 4G. 3G is based on the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) family of standards, under the International Mobile Telecommunications program, IMT-2000. It includes HSPA data transmission capabilities which can deliver speeds of up to 14.4Mbit/s on the downlink and 5.8Mbit/s on the uplink. It is based on CDMA technology, which is dominated by Qualcomm.

Let me now try a simpler way to explain 3G. Remember those days when we used dial-up modems to access the Internet (or maybe you are too young to remember). Believe it or not, many people in the world still rely on dial-up connections to reach the Internet or use their 2/2.5G mobile data connections. 2G is to dial-up connections what 3G is to broadband Internet, with the mobility added to the mix. In the simplest terms, 3G means faster internet access from anywhere, anytime and anyplace. Therefore the first obvious place for 3G to compete is with Wi-Fi on various laptops – nothing new here but just a different technology competing for the corporate dollars for wide area network (WAN) access on the move.

What are the most commonly mentioned applications of 3G?

For the purpose of this article, I want to focus on 3G applications built for mobile phones only – and not standard computer applications. In researching through many sites including www.3g.co.uk/, http://www.3gnewsroom.com/ , http://www.umtsworld.com/ , here is a list of the most common application categories for 3G applications:

- Mobile Internet access
- Digital TV Broadcasting
- Mobile Commerce
- Location Based Services
- Interactive Gaming
- User Generated Content (UGC) Management

Certainly, mobile Internet access becomes a reality with higher speeds just like many applications came to light with the broadband access on the PCs. Therefore it was no surprise that the 3G iPhone dominated any and all searches of 3G applications on the web since its web experience far superseded that of any other phone. The next three applications are neither a direct result nor an obvious outcome of the 3G infrastructure and so they can’t be readily deployed without other major investments in the infrastructure.

Which 3G applications can mobile operators deploy today?

There is a lot that has been written about mobile Internet access and interactive gaming. So, instead, I will focus on UGC management applications - another application type that can be deployed today and doesn’t seem to get enough attention from the media (though many analysts including Juniper Research have done some excellent research on the potential of this market). Many of you are wondering what this UGC market is – and as soon as I start naming the businesses that fall under this category, every one of you will agree that you are an avid consumer of this market and contribute significantly in terms of content, advertisement eyeballs, and other various forms of purchase. Yes, I’m talking about the first wave of the UGC marketplace in the form of media sites including Flickr, PhotoBucket, Snapfish, Shutterfly and YouTube. Then the wave of social networking sites came crashing in, including FaceBook, Friendster, Hi5 and MySpace, just to name a few.

Now that you realize the potential of the UGC market, think of the pain and complexity users experience when posting their content, with a mish-mash of USB/FireWire cables connecting a device to their PC, while ensuring a broadband connection is secured, and then having to manually input the location of their media (if needed). In contrast, let’s look at the 3G phone: a continuous broadband connection, 2+ mega-pixel photo/video camera equipped, your contacts (friends and family) always at your fingertips, AND, with many phones, even location tagging is enabled through GPS or cell tower identification. Hopefully you now see the potential – as a 3G mobile operator – a new ability to initiate, cater to, and develop existing and new mobile user-generated content communities. The categories of applications are both similar to, yet different from, what has been enabled through broadband Internet on PCs. The various applications can be thought of as catering to three functions mobile subscribers want to do with their media:

- Preservation / archiving of users’ media including contacts, pictures, videos, ringtones, SMS and music
- Sharing of users’ media both on a one-to-one basis as well as one-to-many basis giving rise to many new services including mobile greeting cards and video SMS, to name a few
- Publishing users’ media on social networking sites or public forums or creating a social networking site itself

In my next blog entry, I will address more details on some of these applications, as well as address some of the issues and challenges that plague this market, and how mobile operators can begin to deploy and monetize mobile UGC services.

R. Paul Singh
CEO, PixSense, Inc.

Note: If you have any stories/examples of the Mobile Operator experience in deploying mobile UGC applications, please email to us at marketing@pixsense.com

Bookmark this on Delicious

Nokia and Apple; the McCain and the Obama of the mobile industry

From newspapers to magazines, from the internet to the television, all attention is on Obama – the undeclared winner of the race before it is even over. Oops! I meant the Apple iPhone. Then there is McCain struggling to get attention, despite having all the experience in the world – kind of like Nokia.

The parallels don’t stop here. Message of change with not much talk of substance is what defines Obama and the iPhone. Of course, Obama’s message is sexy and attracts a lot of attention from the youth market and many foreigners – even the ones that can’t vote. It’s the same story with the iPhone, a riveting sex appeal and deafening attention from the world over, including from the ones that can neither buy nor afford it. McCain, on the other hand, keeps talking of his experience, like Nokia, vocalizing their extensive knowledge and experience of the mobile industry.

Let’s now turn our attention to the mobile industry and look beyond the hype at an attempt to uncover the real deal behind the Nokia/iPhone war. Nokia makes phones for the masses and so, for comparison purposes, Nokia’s higher-end ‘N series’ phones, like the N82, N95, should be compared with the iPhone.

What is the basic purpose of a phone? To make calls anywhere, anyplace. If you call someone from your address book, probably both phones provide a similar experience. However, my test of a phone is to make calls with one hand while driving and when I put both of these phones to test, the iPhone failed me while most phones with keypads like Nokia worked well. Having a standard RCA phone jack gives us the flexibility to buy headphones of any type – Apple does a good job by equipping the iPhone with the jack, and finally Nokia is learning and standardizing on it. Wearing headphones in both ears has been deemed illegal in many states before the current cell phone laws came into effect. In the case of the iPhone, the way in which headsets are packaged, most users tend to wear headphones in both ears which may be illegal in many states. Nokia, and many others, who had this advantage are giving it up by packaging stereo headsets. Voice quality, although subjective, is surely somewhat better with Nokia’s headset than with the iPhone. Now, on to using the iPhone away from your home network – Yes, you can use AT&T and pay as much as two dollars per minute, but if you want to unlock your iPhone and use the local SIM of the country that you are visiting, don’t expect help from AT&T, which it seems to provide for other phones.

Web browsing is a new purpose introduced by iPhone, with all previous attempts being sub-optimal. There is no doubt that Apple wins here, hands down from every other vendor. Needless to say, with iTunes and iPod’s success, the iPhone offers a much superior experience. Unfortunately, with the limited memory on the iPhone, I wouldn’t use the iPhone any more than I’d use my iPod Shuffle.

Email is another function that the Blackberry streamlined, and just like the iPhone excelled at Web browsing. Needless to say, the Blackberry is the king of the email functionality hill, and the iPhone has a long way to go to catch up. In addition, the absence of a real keypad ensures the sad fact that the iPhone may never be able to catch up on email functionality. Nokia did well on its E Series, although its N Series experience can only be termed sub-optimal.

Five mega pixel cameras and great branded lenses are the hallmark of Nokia’s new phones, including the N95. The iPhone, however, has a long way to get there, but more pictures are being taken per phone by iPhone users because of the bigger screen size and the pictures just look better on the iPhone screen. However, don’t try shooting a video with the iPhone yet, since it doesn’t support that feature, while many low end phones already come equipped with that capability.

The part that really surprised me was the attention that the Apple developer kit and other third party software got from the media. Hello! Symbian (and hence Nokia) has had one of the best developer kits in the industry for a long time and have applications in the thousands available. True, Nokia and Symbian failed in hyping it up, but the fact is that Apple came fashionably late to this party and simply stole the show. Apple has created a revenue model for its software developers, and Nokia needs to learn while it fruitlessly tries to be Google rather than making money for its developers, and hence, for itself.

Extensibility is another area where the iPhone gets zero marks. I’m shocked at how little has been written about it in the press. You can’t replace the battery yourself and the memory is not extendable either since that’s how Apple chose to differentiate its models. On the other hand, most other phones come with a removable battery that you can buy anywhere. Memory is also pretty much standardized in the form of MicroSD cards for most phones. Oh yes, if you want to charge your iPhone without a PC/Mac, be ready to shell out another $20 for the charger, since Apple chose not to supply one.


R. Paul Singh
President & CEO
PixSense.com



Bookmark this on Delicious