Have you hugged a mobile service provider today?

OK. Everyone who gets upset when thinking about mobile operators, raise your hands. Yup.

Now, everyone who gets a warm fuzzy feeling of how wonderful mobile operators are, raise your hands. C’mon now, there’s got to be at least one of you.

Yup. How typical. We all love beating on mobile service providers. They are dinosaurs, they are slow, they are greedy, they are <fill in your favourite complaint>.

But, they have feelings, just like you and me. They have legacy to deal with, a huge number of customers, and business goals, just like you and me. They have a bunch of vendors pitching ideas to them, trying to get a cut of their hard earned money and customers, just like you and me (uh, I think it’s usually you and me). And they have competitors who are ready to gobble up their market when they stumble, just like, you got it, you and me.

Lately, I’ve been trying to put myself in their shoes, trying to find a way to get them from where they are to where I want them to be. Where I want them to be is leading in Communication Services.

Right now, mobile network operators are in the shipping business. You sign up and the operator ships voice minutes, data packets, and SMS packets for a unit price. You ship more, you pay more.

But, the world of telecom networks doesn’t fit that 150 year-old model anymore. Data can come in all shapes and sizes, and not always proportional to their unit use. For example, a photo can be 32kb, 320kb, or 3200kb in size, but it’s still a single photo. Similarly for video and audio.

In the world of Communication Services, you pay for access to the pipe and can pipe through any sort of data permitted by that Class of Service (duh, that’s how broadband fixed-network access works). Voice is a service. SMS is a service. Hey, MMS is a service, too. And, of course, there could be different classes of data services, though I prefer just one – IP (I think that covers the ones we most love, and eventually cover all of them). Of course, now you can have a whole menu of Services that you can charge for in the vertical and horizontal direction.

And here’s where thinking like an operator helps us understand what we are up against.

We always talk about open and unlimited access to the network. Eh, that’s great for the user, but puts an incredible burden on the network operator. Remember, when dial-up was all the rage, the fixed line phone companies were dying under the load, since they had built the network based on 3min calls, not 8hour connections. And then there was the whole fight over termination charges (which is how European ISPs made money).

While I think it would be great if voice, SMS, and data were unlimited under a monthly subscription plan, the bottleneck is the network capacity. 

I think if we could convince operators to charge for Service Class, not for shipping of services (per month vs. per minute or kb) and at the same time, help them build more capacity on their networks, then maybe we have a chance of transforming the mobile networks in the same way as broadband has transformed the Internet.

While there might be the odd operator who would love to provide unlimited something, they know that their network is not up to it. It’s just not built to support such unlimited stuff.*

I don’t think it’s impossible though, and I think if the operators started looking into it (and maybe had a slight change in mind-set) they might find the magical formula.

What do you think?

Now, be sympathetic and go hug an operator. They need a little love and understanding. 🙂

*One thing operators know well is network capacity and how to build the most cost effective network (something like, average usage time per user, and average number of users per base station). I wonder if the muni-WLAN folks are as clever. Talk about the let-down potential due to all the hype.