It’s Connectivity, Stupid!

Here in New York City, I take my wire­less con­nec­tiv­ity for granted. The same thing was true of my trips in Europe. Car­ry­ing a cell phone and a wire­less Palm has never really been a prob­lem and, for a while at least, I was con­vinced that the wire­less rev­o­lu­tion was upon us any minute now.

Last week, while on a busi­ness trip in Cal­i­for­nia, I bumped into what may be the largest bar­rier to a wire­less Inter­net: lack of connectivity.

San Fran­cisco had OK cov­er­age but the Sil­i­con Val­ley, sup­pos­edly ground zero for the Inter­net rev­o­lu­tion, seemed to lack the proper infra­struc­ture. At any moment, your con­nec­tiv­ity is jeop­ar­dized and a move of a few feet can make all the dif­fer­ence in the world between con­nec­tion and lack thereof. All and all, a sad state of affairs.

How­ever, it was per­fectly under­stand­able, con­sid­er­ing all the hills and val­leys cov­er­ing the area. What is more wor­ri­some is that I have yet to find some­one else address­ing this issue. In the last week, I have talked with sev­eral peo­ple in that area and most of them looked at wire­less inter­net access as some­what of an odd­ity. All the peo­ple I talked to are actively involved in the Inter­net indus­try, either as I-builders, con­tent devel­op­ers, or soft­ware man­u­fac­tur­ers. All of them took it for granted that bad cel­lu­lar cov­er­age and lack of recep­tion was a fact of life. A lot of them were involved in wire­less development.

What does all this mean? It means that we are deal­ing with peo­ple devel­op­ing appli­ca­tions with­out really using them. Is that good? I doubt it. From my point of view, one can only make truly rev­o­lu­tion­ary advances in a field if he or she lives within that environment.

So the progress will have to come from some­where else. Last year, I warned of Europe poten­tially becom­ing cen­ter­stage to the Inter­net rev­o­lu­tion; This year, I am start­ing to see proof of that.

In Fin­land, Nokia has already con­nected most of the coun­try with a very impres­sive WAP net­work. 65% of the peo­ple have cell phones and most of those are WAP enabled. Want to check a movie time or restau­rant reviews, you can do so, using WAPit, one of the largest por­tals in the world for WAP appli­ca­tions (unfor­tu­nately, most of the con­tent is in Finnish so if you dot know the lan­guage, is pretty dif­fi­cult to use).

Most peo­ple over there send short e-mail like mes­sages over the SMS pro­to­col. At 160 char­ac­ters per mes­sage, you can­not say much but is enough for “Meet you at the movie the­ater at 7pm” or “Lunch?”

In Spain, Motorola and Packet Video recently demon­strated wire­less video over a GPRS ( the next gen­er­a­tion of high speed GSM) net­work. For the Barcelona exhi­bi­tion, both stream­ing and live video con­tent are being pro­vided from the Inter­net and a selec­tion of web cam­eras, and trans­ported across the Motorola end-to-end GPRS solu­tion to the end-user device. The web cam­eras are sit­u­ated at PacketVideo’s head­quar­ters in San Diego, at the Barcelona con­gress cen­tre itself, and at the Invisix cen­tre of excel­lence in Lon­don, a Motorola/Cisco joint ven­ture says the press release.

In Japan, the rev­o­lu­tion is in color. A recent sur­vey by Nikkei Mar­ket Access showed that over half of the Japan­ese phones pro­duced this year will have color LCD screens. Those will be use to not only surf the web (in full color) but also poten­tially to do video­con­fer­enc­ing over GPRS.

Why is progress hap­pen­ing out­side to the US? Quite sim­ply put, because they have agreed on a stan­dard (GSM) and are now all work­ing on build­ing its next gen­er­a­tion. In the US, we are crip­pled by a num­ber of dif­fer­ent pro­pos­als from each of the providers, which has crip­pled progress as each com­pany goes its own way devel­op­ing its own pro­pri­etary net­work and technology.

What is needed now is for the Amer­i­can wire­less ser­vice providers to sit down and agree on imple­ment­ing GSM. Once that first step is accom­plished, they will then need to fig­ure out a sys­tem to charge each oth­ers back for car­ry­ing a com­peti­tors traf­fic on their net­work. Here’s how it would work. At some set times, the wire­less ser­vice providers would sit down and agree on a stan­dard and a roll­out sched­ule. Once that is accom­plished, they would jointly roll­out GSM net­works all over the coun­try and work on build­ing a sys­tem that would allow any­one to use any­one else’s wire­less net­work. The com­pa­nies would then charge each oth­ers back at the end of the month for all the min­utes that non-subscribers have spent on their net­work. The result would be increase cov­er­age for every­one, but may be a lit­tle more expen­sive than the ser­vice we have nowadays.

Where phone com­pa­nies would inno­vate is on pack­age of new ser­vices they could offer and still on the dis­count­ing schemes they already offer.

The cus­tomers might have to pay a lit­tle more for ser­vice from their provider but they will not have to worry whether they are run­ning on AT&T, Sprint, or some­one else’s network.

Crazy con­cept? I dot think so. Do you worry about whose net­work you’re run­ning on when you are mak­ing a long dis­tance call on your land­line? No, you do not and the kind of agree­ment I am talk­ing about already exists among tel­cos in that space. Why should it be dif­fer­ent in the wire­less world?

You’re prob­a­bly won­der­ing why any com­pany would agree to some­thing like this? How about to regain a lead­er­ship posi­tion in the world mar­ket and allow to use your phone any­where. If such a plan were to be put in place, you could tech­ni­cally have the same phone whether you are in the US or in another coun­try and the wire­less provider could expand into over­seas mar­kets more eas­ily. For­eign­ers are already start­ing to get onto the Amer­i­can mar­ket (British com­pany Voda­fone, for exam­ple, merged its Amer­i­can wire­less oper­a­tions with Bell Atlantic). If Amer­i­can com­pa­nies want to con­tinue their growth, thell have to expand overseas.

Last but not least, the Inter­net indus­try will have to even­tu­ally push for some­thing along those lines if it truly wants the wire­less rev­o­lu­tion to hap­pen. Oth­er­wise, the US will still remain one of the most dis­con­nected coun­try in the world.