Eliott Noss, CEO of Tucows, which launched the Ting mobile service, said it was likely that his company and other MVNOs would be like a “revenge of the ants,” as his and 50 other MVNOs innovated from the bottom up, but didn’t really disrupt the top players.

David Morken, the co-founder and CEO of Bandwidth.com, which operates the Republic Wireless service, vehemently disagreed, saying “I’m not an ant. I think Free [a French MVNO] is a great example of where the market is going.” Free launched a Wi-Fi based mobile phone service that has been highly successful in France. But Free also had sold a broadband product for years, so it already had an established customer base.

Morken, whose Republic Wireless service also makes use of in-home and in-office Wi-Fi to serve of the majority of the plan’s data, said that in 19 months he hopes to have turned the mobile market on its head. While he refused to answer questions about how much cellular data his users need each month, he told me in a conversation before the panel that the current usage allowed the company to be profitable. “If software is eating the world like Marc Andreessen says, it’s eating at a table set by Wi-Fi,” Morken said.

Check out the rest of our Mobilize 2012 coverage here, and the live stream can be found here.

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Three different carriers. Three completely different approaches to the market. The only thing they have in common — besides being part of the newest wave of mobile virtual network operators (MVNOS) — is that they are questioning long-accepted mobile business models. As mobile evolves from a carrier-dominated, vertically integrated and voice-centric industry into a more inclusive, data-focused one, they’re making the case that our fundamental notions of what a carrier is and what it provides should evolve as well.

That transformation will be a major theme at GigaOM’s Mobilize conference next month in San Francisco. David Morken, CEO of Bandwith.com (Republic’s parent); Scott Bendar, co-founder and CTO of FreedomPop; and Ahmed Khattak, co-founder and CEO of GSM Nation will be on the stage at Mobilize to debate the merits of their new approaches to wireless market.

But the transformation of the industry isn’t just limited to carriers. The switch from voice to data has led every link in the mobile value chain to question assumptions formed when the world used wireline networks for data and mobile networks for voice. Device makers have changed the way handsets are designed. Internet companies are grappling with the fact that their customers are moving away from the PC to small-screen devices, with their limited real estate and more challenging revenue models. And infrastructure makers and carriers are re-architecting the fundamental topologies of their networks.

We’re seeing examples of it all over the industry. Facebook’s IPO was clouded by the revelation that it had no idea how to port its advertising-based revenue model over to mobile phones. A growing number of developers are looking to mobile as their first and sometimes only platform. For a company like Foursquared the smartphone isn’t so much a telephony or a computing platform as it is an extension of its owner’s presence in the world. Path (whose CEO Dave Morin is also speaking at Mobilize) has discounted the PC completely, believing the future of social networking relies solely on mobile devices.

In handsets, device makers are grappling with new form factors and users interfaces as the phones original primary function, voice calls, falls to the wayside and the need to create a more immersive data experience comes to the forefront. New large-screened devices like Samsung’s Galaxy Note are blurring the distinction between smartphone and tablet, and my colleague Kevin Tofel believes that one day tablets will replace the smartphone entirely.

Nokia Siemens Networks’ conception of a heterogeneous network

On the network side, carriers and their infrastructure vendors have begun realizing that the big t0wer-based macro-umbrella networks that fueled two decades of voice services aren’t going to cut it in a data-centric world. They’re designing new types of small cells and base stations intended to deliver intense levels of bandwidth over limited areas. Those small cell deployments will eventually evolve into the new heterogeneous network, or HetNet, which will transform cellular systems from coverage-to capacity-focused topologies. Today’s carrier networks have tens of thousands of cells. Future networks will hundreds of thousands if not millions of cells.

The next few years are going to be tumultuous as we negotiate these seismic shifts from mobile voice to mobile data and from the PC-centric to the mobile-centric Internet. Not every MVNO, app developer and infrastructure maker is going to make it. We’ve already seen a big shakeup on the equipment side (Nokia decline and the dissolution of Motorola and Nortel Networks), and the big incumbent mobile operators are struggling to understand their role in the mobile broadband age.

At Mobilize, we’ll be tackling a raft of topics related to that transformation. Here are a just a few speakers to look out for:

• The technology gurus of two major carriers will be in attendance. Sprint CTO Stephen Bye and T-Mobile CTO Neville Ray will discuss their aggressive plans to overhaul their respective carrier’s networks. T-Mobile and Sprint aren’t just launching LTE, they’re actively shutting down large swathes of their 2G networks, and in Sprint’s case, pursuing new small cell and heterogeneous network (HetNet) architectures.
• Samsung has always been a mover and shaker in the handset market, but the rise of the smartphone turned it into the world’s largest mobile device maker. Samsung VP of Global Product Innovation Yoon Lee will discuss with GigaOM’s Stacey Higginbotham how build on that lead and challenge the ever-present Apple.
• Dealing with constantly fluctuating connection speeds – or no data connections – offline synching and huge array of different operating systems are problems with which the old internet didn’t have to cope. Parse CTO Kevin Lacker will discuss how mobile devices becoming the endpoints of the Internet has made the industry rethink the PC-centered models on which data services were built.

Featured photo courtesy of Flickr user Mark Strozier

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