Check out this article from Mobilepipeline.com entitled Wireless Perception Versus Reality. The author, David Haskin, writes:
For all the talk about municipal Wi-Fi networks, will people use them when they’re available? For Mobile Pipeline readers, the answer is overwhelmingly “no” — for now. The recently-completed Mobile Pipeline Voting Booth survey asked what type of mobile connectivity you expect to use in the next year. About 27 percent of respondents said they expect to use 3G offered by wireless carriers. Wi-Fi hotspots drew 19 percent, WiMAX drew 18 percent and only four percent of respondents said they expect to use municipal Wi-Fi networks.
Only four percent of survey respondents said they would use municipal Wi-Fi networks! Haskin says that the reason why his readers don’t want to use muni networks is that they don’t think the government can deliver these types of services. I don’t think that’s everything. He adds:
Also, municipal Wi-Fi has been blasted by incumbent telecoms, claiming it infringes on their turf. The negative public relations undoubtedly has hurt perceptions of municipal Wi-Fi.
That’s more like it. It seems most of Mobile Pipeline’s readers are people in the cellular industry. As for negative publicity, I disagree that it’s municipal Wi-Fi that’s gotten negative publicity. It’s actually the telcos and their sockpuppets. Haskin has it the other way around.
Then, he goes on to tell his readers, don’t worry, Mobile Pipeline readers are not luddites. No, they are actually “computing professionals”, whatever that means, a group that isn’t “accustomed to acquiring services from government, particularly when the precise nature and quality of those services is unknown and surely will vary from city to city.”
Can you think of another type of service, delivered by private industry, whose precise nature and quality are unknown and varies from city to city, or country to country? I can — it’s called mobile phone service. In San Francisco, I can’t get a mobile phone signal inside my apartment in the Castro District. By contrast, in Amsterdam, I can get it in the basement of my house. In parts of Capitola, one hour away from Silicon Valley, I can’t get a signal from T-Mobile. Some friends tell me that Verizon is better, others disagree. Who knows?
How about plain old Wi-Fi service in airports? The service, delivered by private companies, most of whom also happen to be mobile operators, is terrible and expensive in my experience. Government does not have a monopoly on crappy service.
Finally, Haskin’s conclusion that most municipal Wi-Fi services are meant for the poor and for areas where there is no access is only partly correct. His words seem calculated to calm his readers and tell them not to panic.
What he does not say is that a lot of municipalities installing citywide Wi-Fi today are doing it to save money and improve the efficiency of their employees. Indeed, one of the services that these cities are going to drop once they get a citywide Wi-Fi network in place is cellular data, exactly the sort of expensive data service Mobile Pipeline’s readers are pitching today. Another service that cities are eager to roll out for their own personnel is mobile voice over Wi-Fi. Another reason to drop mobile cellular service.
Reasons for the total disconnect
I was wondering why there is a total disconnect between Mobile Pipeline’s “computing professionals” and the rest of us. James Enck has this explanation:
Earlier today I spoke with an uber-platinum value reader, who commented that recent industry conferences have revealed the sheer prevalence of obsolescent hardware in the hands of the average telco employee. Aged, battered laptops are common, and for at least one carrier, Word 97 is apparently the corporate standard. We both concluded that this may contribute to some of the apparent befuddlement we witness when confronting telcos with some of the threats which may bring them to their knees.
Devices locked down by corporate IT policies, running last century’s applications on slow processors, will never know the joys of a truly good Skype connection, or marvel at the elegance with which BitTorrent can do its job under the right circumstances. This is strange in light of all the sloganeering going on. BT’s currently using “More power to you,” but perhaps that should be more appropriately stated as “More power to you – whatever it is you’re doing.”
While the telcos grapple with their own internal issues and their very size and complexity, the broadband consumer may be at least one technology generation ahead of the service provider’s people, which is a very real risk in terms of understanding the customer’s point of view. Take Richard Stastny’s recent experience. Sunday he posited the idea of integrating Skype user IDs in ENUM, and by Thursday someone had done it, incorporating the Skype callto: URI in an ENUM softphone. More power to us, whatever it is we’re doing!
James is a European Telecom Analyst (Global Telecom Strategist) with Daiwa Securities in London and if you don’t have his EuroTelcoBlog on your RSS newsreader yet, it’s time to add it.
So it’s people using “eight track tape” versus those already on iPods. Could that be the cause of the disconnect? Maybe the Digital Divide isn’t between rich and poor, but between telcos and their customers.
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