Operators Should Welcome Web Brands

One of the most common pieces of advice to operators is to stick to their core competency — running a network. BusinessWeek does a pretty good job of summarizing the argument: “Mobile operators had asked themselves, “How difficult can it be to design handsets and run portals?” It turned out to be very difficult.” Operators took on the handset manufacturers a few years ago, and while it looked like they had the upper hand for a while carrier-branded phones are still in the small minority, and not really sought after by consumers. While most content is sold through the operator portals that is largely viewed as being because of restrictions rather than operators doing a good job of promoting mobile content, which is still (hopefully) at the early stages of its market development. Which is not to say that no operators have done any good things for mobile content, but I think they’ve taken it about as far as they can go — which a lot of them seem to realise as they introduce unrestricted data plans and sign deals with web brands.

Still, BusinessWeek is arguing that operators should welcome web brands with open arms rather than that they should be resigned to working with them. The argument: “Growth for mobile operators is, to a large extent, dependent on innovations from a few handset manufacturers, while growth for broadband providers is dependent on services and content developed by thousands of Internet players, both big and small. The result is that the mobile market is struggling to grow, while the fixed broadband market is struggling to keep up with growth.” A good point, although it should be countered with the point that it wasn’t until the latest round of network upgrades were installed that it became feasible — if more than a handful of people used the first 3G networks they would fall over.

Skweezer: As possible support to this argument, Greenlight Wireless has announced that its Skweezer service (which reformats web pages to fit onto mobile phones and reduce data traffic) has skweezed 150 million pages. (release)

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