The most audible sound in the communications industry this year has been that of business models starting to crumble.
The old models are not yet gone, by any means, but the cracks are there for all to see. 2007's prime example has been the furore over roaming within the EU. At last, the European Commission put its foot down and forced mobile operators to slash the absurd charges they were levying on those poor souls who dare stray across national borders.
The cuts only covered voice communications, but the European Commission continues to rattle its sabre over the issue of "data roaming" — perhaps an even more egregious example of charging well over the odds. For business travellers, roaming has become a budgeting nightmare.
Far more budgetable is the use of Wi-Fi while travelling, and another significant development began to take shape when BT inked a deal with Wi-Fi-sharing "community" Fon. The deal linked up the burgeoning Fon community with BT's extensive Home Hub user base. The idea is for users to share their Wi-Fi with others, in return getting to use other people's connections for free. As Fon has similar deals with major ISPs in countries like France and the US, the potential is there for a global Wi-Fi-sharing community that could wipe out the idea of costly data roaming.
Mobile operators have been experimenting with other sources of revenue, but new technologies are not always lapped up by the populace. Mobile TV is a case in point. Launched last year, BT's Movio mobile TV service was supposed to capture the eyeballs of the nation. But things did not turn out that way. With only one customer — Virgin Mobile and its clunky "Lobster" handset — the service shut down halfway through 2007. Not only were people unmoved by the prospect of annihilating their handset's battery life to stare at miniscule screens for hours, but the entire scheme had been thrown into disarray by the European Commission, which decided it wanted to back a rival mobile TV standard instead.
Mobile TV now looks unlikely to be bothering our radio spectrum for the foreseeable future, but the airwaves provided the battleground for another titanic clash this year — that of the rival mobile-broadband technologies. Having already paid billions to provide 3G services, mobile operators have been understandably keen to see the long-term evolution (LTE) of 3G become the new mobile-broadband standard, but big hitters like Intel have been enthusiastically backing another technology, mobile WiMax.
No big decisions were taken in 2007 for mobile broadband — next year's spectrum auctions will contribute towards that — but it has been a year of rapid progression for WiMax, which is now being deployed as an alternative to wired broadband in several developing countries. WiMax is also available — on a limited scale — as a commercial service in the UK, but testing of LTE has yielded even more impressive speeds. And, with WiMax being folded into the 3G family of standards, next year could even see both technologies combining to form the elusive "4G".
Another business model that faces extinction is that of the proprietary mobile charger. This may not seem at first to be a significant issue, but entire industries — accessories and peripherals — are built around the premise of having a unique connector. But no longer. This year the industry decided to bow to the environmental lobby and standardise on the micro-USB connector format. Manufacturers will get to...
