How useful would email be if you could only send a message to someone else who used the same ISP? It would be pointless -- imagine, a Verizon customer being unable to send an email to an AT&T user! Who would ever design such a communication system?
Yet when mobile phone companies implemented text messaging on their networks less than a decade ago, that's exactly the type of framework that was developed. A Verizon user couldn’t text an AT&T user. Only recently has cross-network texting been enabled.
Nevertheless, when it comes to other types of mobile applications, developers must still deal with the specific limitations of each carrier. Every first-year software engineering student understands the value of standards. Why has the importance of standards continued to elude the carriers?
Control and greed are the reasons, and it’s killing the mobile market. While penetration is fine and plenty of phones are being sold, the uptake of new mobile applications has stalled.
Compare this state of affairs to the rise of the Internet. On the Internet, low connection costs combined with open standards has spawned an explosion of new applications and technologies. And this explosion has in turn driven even more Internet use, and created more new customers for the ISPs.
Interestingly, the ISPs have responded not by increasing network capacity, but by complaining that users are consuming too much bandwidth (even though they originally promised "unlimited" usage for many of their plans). Providers have throttled applications, suggested tiered pricing, and in some cases simply cut off users who exceeded arbitrary limits.
With telecom consolidation, those ISPs are now in many cases the same folks who run the mobile networks. They include AT&T and Verizon in the United States, and Bell, Rogers, and Telus in Canada. They are chasing the holy grail of the mobile phone world -- maximizing ARPU (average revenue per user). This basically means charging as much as possible for the services provided. In that sense, it’s not unlike what they are attempting to do for their ISP businesses.
In the mobile realm, the service providers have limited what handsets can do. They are locking out features and locking in customers -- in other words, exerting absolute control over what customers are allowed to do with their own products. And in the process, they are killing the possibility of achieving an Internet-like explosion.
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