Yesterday, AT&T dropped its bombshell that it would implement a tiered pricing structure for iPhone customers. If you happened to visit the Parc 55 Hotel in San Francisco this morning, you found out why.
The hotel was the site of the 2010 World Wireless Congress and heavyweight representatives from Ericsson, Intel, Cisco, and other firms got together to discuss a wide range of issues facing the mobile world. They were the least surprised people on the planet about the AT&T announcement.
“In the mobile networks, it’s all about data,” said Jan Uddenfeldt of Ericsson. “Clearly data has taken over and is really driving everything.”
He pointed out that just a few weeks ago, for the first time, mobile data traffic surpassed mobile voice. Cisco’s own projections call for a 39 HUNDRED percent increase in data traffic by 2014. Our smartphones are being used for surfing the web, playing movies, and checking email more than they are for plain old yak.
AT&T (and most other wireless phone providers) is clearly overwhelmed by the exploding data usage generated by the popularity of the iPhone and its expanding applications. Ditto for Google’s Android phones which are sneaking up in popularity. It is likely that the other wireless phone service carriers will soon move to similar pricing models as they grapple with the need to bring some order to the huge amounts of bandwidth being used today.
Watching technology grow up is never pretty. Our wireless world today is run by a dogs’ breakfast of 2G, 3G and WiFi technologies, some of which work better than others. As Pouya Taaghol of Intel dryly put it, “ WiFi is like a public toilet. You don’t know the quality of what you get, but you can’t live without it.”
Now, to complicate things further, we have 4G wireless technology on the horizon. Sprint Nextel is scheduled to release its first 4G phone tomorrow and Verizon is planning to roll out a 4G network in the fall. The promise of 4G is that it is better designed for transmitting data, which of course is where all of this is headed. But no one at the high profile confab today could offer any confidence that it will be able to handle the load.
So sit back, fire up your cell phone and get ready for a wild ride. As Intel’s Taaghol put it, “The beauty of the Internet is that nobody knows what’s going to come next.”
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