[Hands0n]

I have said that 2008 will be the year of Mobile Data. Perhaps this article supports my forecast a little. Interesting that "Mobile Broadband" has made a 10% bite into the market in the past six months (see article below). At this rate, the ETA for an overtake of wired broadband seems achievable.

Definitely "killer app" stuff that the mobile operators ignored, and that we all kicked and screamed for since 3G hit the streets. Oh well, seven years is probably not too long to wait :)



Broadband comparison site Top-10-Broadband has predicted that 'Mobile Broadband' (3G) services from operators such as Three, T-Mobile and Vodafone, could overtake land-line based home equivalents by as early as 2010.

Based on data from thousands of UK broadband package sales over the past six months, the site has seen mobile broadband sales increase by over 50% month on month since adding them to their website. Mobile broadband now makes up over 10% of their total broadband sales from 0% only six months ago:

Alex Buttle, Marketing Director at Formula, says: “The uptake of mobile broadband on our site has been astonishing and really took us by surprise since we started selling mobile broadband products in October 2007. We believe this trend is as significant as the shift from home to mobile phones that took place in the mid 1990s and reflects the increasing demand for greater flexibility in communications devices. Laptop sales have also boomed in recent years as costs have come down and it looks like mobile broadband has finally caught up - giving people the option to surf anywhere at an affordable price”

Buttle continues, “Major mobile broadband providers like Vodafone, T Mobile, 3 and Orange are competing hard and a price war has meant great prices for consumers with deals starting from just £10 a month. The same providers are also beginning to spend huge budgets on offline marketing as characterised by the inescapable nature of mobile broadband adverts on buses, tubes, newspapers, TV and radio stations.”

The popularity of Mobile Broadband services may be growing and the information above is certainly impressive, although such services are highly unlikely to overtake established land line solutions in such a short timeframe. Most mobile broadband services still lack the flexibility, performance, services and network infrastructure of competing DSL and cable technologies.

In addition we’ve yet to see any firm figures from operators to corroborate the uptake of independent mobile broadband services. Recent subscriber statistics from the major ISPs have shown no decline in land line broadband users. This may suggest that Mobile Broadband services are being brought as a companion to existing products rather than a replacement.


Source: http://www.ispreview.co.uk/news/EkpukAkkEVPkUODjVg.html

[Ben]

Well, I certainly don't think we should underestimate the ability of the mobops to provide mobile broadband on a large scale. There will, perhaps, be a few bumps in the road over the remainder of the year if growth really is in step with what has been reported in the media lately, but clear consumer demand for this product/service should already have CEO's seeing £££'s - surely enough to push development forward.

Hardware is still lacking, of course.

We need:

Home routers - modern home routers with a SIM card slot, ethernet ports and a/b/g/n.
PCI modems - Possibly not a massive seller, but these should be available on new PC's and as add-in cards for old ones, much like a/b/g/n cards.
Smaller 'stick' USB modems, so they're as easy to carry around as now-tiny USB storage sticks.
Integrated mobile broadband in all new laptops.


On the network side, we need:

To know how firewalling is managed. Will all connection security be provided by the mobop? Will there be any ability to configure port forwarding etc?
Provision for static, or at least public, IP addresses. AFAIK the mobops currently assign internal IP's, provisioned via some sort of super NAT system.
Online, real-time bandwidth usage statistics and graphs, along with the dates between which the usage allowance is valid.
Routing improvements. Even the mobop with the best latency, Vodafone, insists data goes over a large number of hops before reaching the Internet.
Clarity in Content Control. I only have experience with Vodafone, but they're a bad offender, requiring a customer to complete content control authorisation to access sites offering services such as free text messaging... talk about cheek.


I like the idea of a virtual, managed firewall with just some basic configuration options. The mobops should produce a web portal that can only be accessed over the mobile broadband data connection displaying usage stats and allowing for configuration. That way, we'd get a relatively powerful service using cheap, low spec hardware. It'd also be much more secure for users - we've already seen that, in general, Internet users cannot be expected to secure their own computers or connections.

Such an interface should also be capable of managing multiple SIM's under one account - as there isn't the complexity of routing calls here there's no reason why a family shouldn't be able to have several SIM's in various bits of hardware capable of using their broadband allowance.

It's clear that the mobops want to succeed in this market without emulating the increasingly low-margin services provided by fixed line operators. IMHO, they should take note of my suggestions.