The Mobile Internet Era

[Sean Lew]

Some 15 over years back, I have been introduced dial up internet and approximately 5 years later, broadband internet was installed in my parent’s place. It really wasn’t that long ago that all these things happened. Recently, mobile internet took off and I have been extremely interested to understand the impacts of this technology in the future usage of the internet.

Mobile internet has so far done very well in the social networking, search, emails and voice communication area. Other services like GPS has also been very helpful. However, in areas where high bandwidth / computational processing power is required, the current set of handsets are not quite capable. Nothing is impossible and with the advent of netbooks, it could increase mobile internet usage but this is still unproven.

In this post, I will be looking at the following areas – network technology, network providers, handset providers, content providers and consumer usage trend. I will also be providing a brief overview of the issues and impacts on the future of mobile internet.

Network technology
3G and Wimax technology has been around for some time now and in some metropolitan areas, Wifi can be found everywhere, additionally, LTE (or 4G) is in the horizon. Speeds are increasing and as time goes by, the stability of the connections are improving. So far there hasn’t been a clear technology that is winning across the world. I believe there is still quite a distance to cover before we achieve a standard platform across the world – pretty much like GSM is quite standard in most countries. Depending on the technology chosen, the capabilities of what consumers can do on their handsets would be impacted.

With the increase of mobile usage very rapidly, backhaul stations would need to be upgraded constantly and if consumers are experiencing constant dropouts or slow speeds in a particular area, that will have an impact on usage, company image/reputation and pricing.

Network providers
Network providers are in a constant fight to win spectrum licenses from the government and that could have a drastic impact of the implementation of such technologies. Awarding these licenses not only have commercial impacts but also a technological and political one.

Network providers build the infrastructure to allow mobile internet access and so far they have also tried to play in the space of content providers by providing videos and music to their phones at a premium price. Due to the early phases of this technology on mobile phones, they are winning. However, content providers are emerging and this could change the game (this will be covered later).

Also due to the high levels of uncertainty in the technological future of mobile internet, the investments of smaller telcos have not been aggressive.

Handsets provider
Handsets in this case is not limited to mobile phones but also devices like broadband modems (3G, Wifi), netbooks, and laptops. These devices determine the types of access the user can get based on the operating system, applications, processing power, screen size and many more. The handsets at the end of the day would determine the amount of usage a user makes. It could easily be assumed that on mobile phones the amount of data that is used will be far lesser than a netbook or a laptop and the difference would even be larger is the connection was based on traditional ADSL connections. For network providers, they want more usage but for handsets providers they want to sell more products – there is a misalignment here.

Content providers
Content providers are finding it hard to play at the moment. Due to the large variety of handsets and network capability, there isn’t a clear way to deliver these content. Alot of these content at the moment is delivered via the browser which is still the platform of choice however, browsers on mobiles are not the best application to deliver content and users are expecting alot more. Content like mobile TV, real time news update, VOIP and locational social networking services. For these to be possible, there are alot of dependencies on network and handset providers.

Consumer usage trends
Consumers have so far not ventured too far with their mobile internet services. Emails and search is generally the key usage on mobile handsets. However in countries like Japan and Korea, the usage has moved alot more into videos and music. Also mobile internet usage is still mainly used by the younger generations and business people. Providers needs to target the other market segments to increase adoption and usage.

Conclusion
There are many unknowns and there are quite a number of parties that have the capability to change the market and the game. This market will constantly evolve for the next few years and as it evolves, it will impact businesses and individuals.



More from the original blog...