by Todd Gibson

Co-Founder and Co-Editor - WIIE

As the date nears for CTIA 2010 in Las Vegas next week, announcements, leaks and press releases are starting to emerge on the Internet which depicts strong competition in the mobile broadband market.  In this article, I want to take a look at several key areas that I feel are vitally important to the consumer including trends that will significantly improve the consumer’s mobile experience.  Google, Microsoft and Sony are developing products and platforms that will challenge Apple’s lock and loyalty with iPhone customers.  Cloud computing is emerging as a lucrative market with mobile devices & computing.  The saga and consumer confusion between 3G and 4G data services will continue throughout 2010.

It is being reported that Sony is developing a new Sony PSP style phone that will be capable of playing games and other applications.  It is being reported that Microsoft’s Project “Pink” will be essentially a Zune with Windows Mobile 7 operating system embedded so the device can function as a mobile phone in addition to the Zune features/functions.  Google is continuing aggressively to further its Android operation system with new base builds, features and devices.  Google is set to release the Nexus One on Verizon’s network next week.  In my opinion, Apple’s lock on the industry with the iPhone is set to diminish considerably this year.  Over the years, I have been an avid iPhone user but, about mid-year last year, I dropped my iPhone for the MyTouch – Android based phone from T-Mobile.  All-in-All, this stiff challenge and competition is going to have a positive impact on the market, greater options, functionality and more competitive pricing of handsets, applications and service plans.

AT&T is jumping more into the cloud computing arena with their launch of Mobile Share which will enable their customers to store photos and videos online for free – up to 250MB.  In addition, AT&T is going to offer an online backup service for a customer’s address book/contacts.  Both of these services will be available on the new Samsung Strive which is set to debut next week.  T-Mobile has been offering these services for a few years and I expect to see more applications & carriers to engage in these types of services.  Carriers are in a position of driving increased data revenues which is extremely challenging in a broadband pipe world.  As price per megabyte continues to drop, carriers are searching for new ways to generate and capture data revenues instead of being corned into the pipe model.  Creating and enabling cloud computing applications is an effective way to offer new features to consumers which can be handset agnostic.  These types of applications and services can be an effective way to increase loyalty and reduce churn for a carrier.

Looking at the 3G versus 4G and my map is bigger than your map messaging from the consumer standpoint, it is fairly easy to say that there is considerable confusion amongst the consumers on what all this really means.  Clearwire and Sprint continue to push their 4G WiMAX service and touting average speeds between 3 and 6Mbps supporting bursts of over 10Mbps.  In review of archived bandwidth speed tests on DSL Reports for Clearwire, their customers are averaging of around 1.16Mbps just by looking at the results while they claim their network is 4G.  In comparison, T-Mobile is moving forward with HSPA+ (3.5G w/ 21Mbps) with real world speeds expected to be around 10-11Mbps based upon a PCMag.com report.  The same PCMag.com compared T-Mobile’s existing 3G network to Sprint and Verizon which showed T-Mobile’s bandwidth speeds over 3Mbps in comparison to Sprint’s and Verizon’s bandwidth speeds under 1Mbps.  Based upon an interview with Verizon’s CTO, Dick Lynch, Verizon’s projected 4G/LTE bandwidth data speeds will be between 8 – 12Mbps.  From a consumer perspective, the consumer sees a plethora of information regarding a lot of technical information that does not make very much sense to the average user.  The consumer hears, 4G is the fastest but industry reports and field testing are finding that 3G and 3.5G networks in some cases are actually faster from the consumer perspective.  Some carriers are driving the confusion in the industry which will continue to drive distrust of the carriers from the consumers.  Ethical reporting and consistent definitions of telecom acronyms need to be reported.  Comparing 3G maps with a competitor while one 3G map is showing speeds between 700 – 800Kbps versus the competitor’s 3G map of speeds around 1.5 – 1.6Mbps (see PC World’s Bandwidth Report) is not, in my opinion, comparing apples to apples.  Verizon is promising LTE in their rural markets which surfaces a major obstacle to truly delivering effective bandwidth speeds and that is delivering extremely fast, Metro Ethernet like speeds, to the edge so that customers can actually take advantage of the wireless speeds supported by their 3rd or 4th generation wireless device.

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