Not obsessed, but a little impressed

Looking back at the news pages last month – and at the pages in this month’s issue – it seems as if we have developed something of a fixation on 3. Rest assured, that is not the case. But it is also true that here is an operator who seems to be getting its users closer to the mobile lifestyle we are so often promised is within our reach. We report on pages 10 and 11 that there is much work still to be done at 3, but the company surely deserves a late entry in the GSMA’s marketing campaign award category in February for how it has executed the arrival of this clutch of X-Series products, all enabled by a flat rate data tariff. 3 has assembled a formidable array of internet companies to partner with, and by being the first to do so can give the illusion of exclusivity. Of course, in a true open garden environment instead of doing a deal to say which VoIP client the operator would support, users could go and find the one they already have. And so on for each of the other services offered. But as Frank Sixt says, it’s just a start. And no doubt users at other operators will soon be asking, “Where’s our X-Series?”
One man sure to have strong views on not over-promising on the benefits of a suite of services like X-Series would be O2’s cto, Dave Williams. On pages 14 and 15, we include his admirably frank rundown of which technologies he rates now, which he’s keeping an eye on with a serious view to doing something about, and those which he is keeping an eye on just to make sure they don’t surprise him by suddenly becoming useful. We were taken by his enthusiasm for the in-building pico and femto cell solutions, with a WLAN router integrated, that would, by using DSL as backhaul, allow users to make calls (and in the 3G version, do all the cool data stuff) from their mobile, bypassing completely their fixed telephony provider. Because, for this to work, you would need to have a broadband connection from Be (or O2 Broadband as we may come to know it). The deal looks a good one to me.