Live from Mobile 2.0 in Barcelona: the MNOs are making the point that 17% of major operator traffic in Europe is YouTube (wow!!) and that they’d need to invest EUR70B today to upgrade networks to accomodate social media growth. At which point startups went “well you’re in a terrible business then” and operators went “well we won’t give you access”. And then people just started insulting eachother.
Flickr pic from Dan Appelquist with the panel members’ names.
Mobile is so fun. Especially when the channel friction is so palpable!
13 Comments
I agree, what a show!
Mea culpa for starting the cracker with this but one thing startups tend to forget is that operators themselves are relatively new companies - about a ten year old average or even less if one considers the MVNOs like Virgin - and as such, they entered the mobile market with revenue models that ranked up their costs of sales to extortion levels - as both Telefonica and Vodafone confessed after the panel, the churn rates in Spain are worse than the speed one is dumped by boyfriends/girlfriends in highschool.
So bear in mind, if you please, subsidising smartphones, call centres for customer care, billing processing . . And low-and-behold the infamous 3G licenses and the dollar taking a cardiac slide. Data traffic will not bring the house down because only a small segment of the population is hooked on twitter and video uploads but handling all those customers may and creating revenue share models with the startups will not be straightforward.
Max & Irina, first of all, great discussion on your panel.
Second, I was one of those bashing the panel from the back of the room, as I didn’t understood where the people from T-Mobile were getting at, but it all comes to a word: greedy.
She said that one of their problems was the excessive use of P2P and Youtube, well Sherlock, welcome to the real world of ISPs. They’ve made it “their problem” when they went after the ISPs for the ADSL and Internet access, with those 3G dongles. Instead of providing a good mobile internet user experience on every handset, they are providing two lousy ones with 3G dongles and their high rates, as with the no real internet access product on the mobile devices, where there’s no good data plan.
I know that they have an infrastructure problem, but as I “shouted”, they’re the new ISP’s, they should be thinking about data (future) and stop working around voice (past).
Also, the “come to us with your business plan, and we’ll help you” sounds so bad…
As one of the organizer of Mobile 2.0, I and we recognize we need
to do a better job of framing the discussion and leading to a better dialogue of the respective roles that Operators and Application/Solutions providers have in the Mobile Ecosystem. Stay tuned in San Francisco
Gregory,
I actually think it was a great event and the discussion was framed well. Really brought out the issues and next time we can focus on solving them. Look forward to next year!
Max
Sorry I missed it. It is vaguely familiar tone from the last great mobile bubble (WAP services in 99/00). The difference was that the mobile operators seem to be a bit more user driven, that is they see the demand for YouTube, then they see the potential demand for social media and extrapolate. Ten years ago they would have made up demand in their own facilities and then been shocked when no-one made a video call. It’s a vast improvement. And if they can find someone of enjoying a piece of the economic pie, then why not.
Jesus
I can’t believe you fucking moderate comments on your own blog.
Victor, my name is nor Irina, but I reckon you got confused with the slightly Slavic accent of the T-Mobile lady,…. but you are forgiven.
I am pingbacking to this post from my column at shift6.net this morning.
In this mobile services “corrida de toros” (bullfight) everyone is going to have to learn how to turn the bloody fight into an Art….
ahhh names… you see, mine’s not “Victor” but “Vitor” :-)
Either way, I’m sorry for the name confusion, as I wrote on my post (http://lists.paradigma.pt/pipermail/tce/2008-July/000255.html) the t-mobile lady was getting nonsense and FUD on the conversation.
I don’t see it as a bullfight, but rather as an emerging market where we’re competing with Golias.
@Azeem: my site, my rules.
Also: less using name of Lord in vain.
Heathen.
Nobody expected this..
Miss T-Mobile lit the fire…and WHABOOM!
I dont believe framing the discussion was a issue aswell..
I agreed with you
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