TORONTO – We’re just at the very beginning of the mobile broadband revolution in Canada, but expect the market to explode over the next five years, said a number of speakers Monday morning at the 2008 Canadian Telecom Summit in Toronto.
Carriers around the world are already facing “the commoditization of mobile bandwidth,” said Alcatel-Lucent’s CIO Jim Cacito in his speech to delegates, adding that commoditization comes in the form of all-you-can-eat bandwidth bundles.
It’s still early days Stateside, and such packages are due in Canada soon. (Ed note: Perhaps on or about July 11th, launch day of the Apple iPhone by Rogers and its puppy-brand Fido.)
Operators will be increasingly forced to sell all-in broadband mobile deals as developments in way-cool devices and neat-o applications, led by video, drive more customers to use ever-more minutes on their handhelds and more bandwidth on their carriers’ networks.
Cacito pointed to a U.S. study which saw the average number of minutes customers spend on their mobile handsets jump from 400 to almost 1,500 minutes when an all-in bandwidth option was the contract.
The first big change in Canada, most likely, will come next month when Rogers debuts Apple’s iPhone because to take advantage of the little touch-screen’s full suite of applications and multimedia features, the cost of bandwidth will have to fall. While Rogers Communications president and COO Nadir Mohamed didn’t say directly this morning that was going to be the case, his presentation alluded to the coming wave of pricing changes in the mobile market.
“Pricing is evolving to drive mobile broadband penetration,” is the closest he came to saying it. “We are at the front of a fundamental shift in the communications industry.”
And it’s not about the network, “it’s about the mobility of the consumer,” said Joseph Ziskin, IBM’s vice-president, corporate strategy, in a multi-screen panel session Monday morning.
And it is not easy to make video work on cellular networks, especially given the various video standards and myriad form-factors of handset screens. “It’s a huge engineering challenge,” added Derek Kuhn, v-p strategic solutions at Alcatel-Lucent. “How can you deal with transcoding and storage of the same media assets across every conceivable screen?”
What Canadian and American consumers want, added Kuhn, is an easy way to access their content from any device, all the time, according to research they commissioned by Ipsos. They want it on the go. They want it in the car. They want security. They want to share it.
And they’ll pay for help to get all that, personally converged for them – in the range of $8 to $11 a month. “This is a huge opportunity for operators because they can enable this for consumers,” who view cable companies as most able to pull this off for them, added Kuhn – even as all that connectivity blurs the lines between wireless and wireline connections.
“It’s about a two-way interactive experience that builds community and brings the domain of devices in your family network together,” he explained.
