The battle between handset manufacturers and carriers over who gets the revenues from mobile content has been a long and fierce battle, and widely reported…but the WSJ has a front-page article that covers the battle pretty well. Most of the article is taken up with the efforts of RIM to get features into its Blackberry’s, such as a mapping solution which was rejected because AT&T wanted to sell its own version of a map service for $9.99 a month. The article goes into some detail of the serious effort RIM went into creating mobile content and services only to have them stymied by the carriers, which makes an interesting read.
It’s not just services…”When Nokia wanted to bring a new wireless email device to the U.S. last year, AT&T insisted it remove the WiFi chip before AT&T would offer it to consumers. A Nokia sales executive, Todd Thayer, said the company will be less likely to strike that compromise in the future and will sell WiFi handsets directly in its stores. A spokeswoman for AT&T said the carrier will permit only those built-in features it thinks subscribers want.” It’s clear why the carriers are concerned — they don’t want to be relegated to mere data transporters like they are with the fixed internet. However, the quote from the AT&T spokeswoman is very illustrative, and not just because she tried to make it look like AT&T were making sacrifices for its users.
The idea that AT&T knows what its customers want is good when it comes to trying to optimize the experience of its users, but when it comes to actively preventing users from getting something it crosses the line into unnecessary tyranny. After all, built-in features can be very easily ignored, and offering a single WiFi-enabled handset to its customers is not going to suddenly cause them anguish — the real reason AT&T refuses to offer a WiFi phone is not because it thinks no-one wants it, but because it’s worried customers would want it too much and then use it to lower their call and data costs. Of course, carriers shouldn’t be expected to spend a lot of money subsidizing things that are only going to reduce revenue, but it would help if they were honest about it. Nokia indicated it would start selling these sorts of handsets in its own stores, which is fair enough and shouldn’t alarm the carriers because they won’t be subsidized. Content services are similar — all of the content that the carriers refused to include preloaded on the phones they sell can be got off the web. The battle isn’t over yet — and I think carriers will have the upper hand until US consumers change their behaviour and are willing to spend more on unsubsidized handsets.
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