…Barcelona — only a superficial sign of greater change
Welcome to what is always our favourite issue of the year — put together in the dark of January but anticipating the slightly less depressing days of a week in February spent in Cannes, er, correction, Barcelona.
The change of venue for 3GSM this year is of course only superficial, and perhaps not even permanent. But other changes are more likely to have a deeper and more lasting impact. In our 3GSM “hot topics” piece, starting on page 21 of this issue, we discuss the buzzword bingo that you could play at this year’s event. For us one of the cliches of 2006 will be the amount of references you will hear to Skype, Google, E-Bay, Microsoft and Yahoo! etc entering the mobile market. “The telecommunications industry,” you will be told in a dozen strangely similar looking powerpoint slides, “has changed.” A timeline will reproduce the announcements and market entries into your field of the above players. The speaker will tell you that mobile operators need to respond to this change, or face becoming bit pipes.
This is all true, of course, but the good news is you’re part of an industry that two years ago might not have known where to look but is now in a much healthier state to do something about it. Granted, there are still the big questions — How much of a threat is mobile voice over IP and what can I do about it? Does giving over some real estate to the internet players on the device necessarily dilute my own band equity? Why are we pushing ahead with a mobile digital broadcast TV standard in a frequency that might not be available for years?
But the vibrancy of the debate, the actual live services and applications available and generating profit on mobile networks prove that there are also plenty of answers. From back end systems to the handset user interface this disruptiveness and change is sparking innovation. Start-ups are finding funding, there’s even the odd IPO around (any news from 3Italy or UK on that one?) and even the big ticket stock prices are holding up (Just about, eh, Mr Sarin?). So whether you’re reading this in Barcelona or some other corner of our mobile world, enjoy this issue as we track those changes and the market’s responses to them.
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