Jobs mulled building own mobile network for iPhones Telecoms execs will be shifting nervously in their seats today as news filters out of a near miss for their business models. Steve Jobs wanted to ditch the mobile operators and make his own network for iPhones when he thrust them upon the world in 2007, says John Stanton, a wireless industry pioneer. Stanton was speaking in …
And Wifi mesh networking can grow to its many nooks and crannies. Apple doesn't have to invest in coverage to all of it, maybe a few hubs at most.
Crowdsourcing already works wonders for location services, in a few years when we're all packing Wifi enabled smartphones of some kind...
Although Microsoft is better positioned for it since they own Skype already.
In a year or two Apple will have to do LTE. LTE mandates IMS implementation which nicely gives the operator back the billing and service control interface.
So unless Apple manages to kill IMS completely and switch completely to a VOIP framework of its own for LTE it will have no choice but to give the operators the keys to chains that yank it in the correct place along with other phone vendors. Ditto for Google.
Granted Microsoft (skype), Apple (facetime), Google (gtalk) have all prepared themselves for that battle, but it is yet to be fought. The fat lady has not sung its last song yet for the operator model.
Perhaps if he truly wanted to "bypass the telcos" he could do it the way Asda Mobile, Tesco Mobile, etc, have done it, without actually installing a single Mbit of capacity.
Their model doesn't really bypass the telcos at all but works by reselling someone else's product at lower prices than the branded equivalent, relying on low margin high volume channel/product to make money.
But of course low prices and low margin are not The Apple Way.
In what way do the official mobile operators have "excess capacity", at least in the country where you can get Asda, Tesco, and Virgin mobile?
I fully understand the MVNO concept and the excess bandwidth concept. I even used to understand the significance of OSS, BSS, HLRs, SS7 and other such verbiage. Feel free to blind me with science if you wish :)
As a punter I also understand the achievable throughputs on any of the UK's mobile networks (be they GSM, GPRS, EDGE, or 3G) very very rarely come anywhere near the theoretical values, whatever O2 may have claimed at their "4G" launch earlier this week.
"The download speeds of Tesco/Giff Gaff vs O2 contract customers is a great example."
Sounds plausible, especialy given the target markets, but is there any actual evidence?
Could have been the biggest flop in the companies history.
Still if would have been a real laugh watching hundreds of fanbois huddled round access points desperate to update their facebook pages (sorry make that iface pages, facebook is outside Apples control so wouldn't be allowed inside the wall), twit and heaven forbid, actually make a phone call. I wonder whether anyone in Apple remembers the Rabbit phone?
Still this might explain why the original iPhone was launched with no 3G.
People just want a connection, a pipe.
Operators have NOTHING else that people want or need.
SMS? Charging lots for something that costs nothing...
They charge about x300 times per MByte for voice (2G, 3G) than Data. Expect data prices to double when the old licences to print money (SMS and voice) evaporate.
Same problem.
> Get used to it Operators #
> People just want a connection, a pipe.
s/pipe/phone/
> Operators have NOTHING else that people want or need.
s/Operators/Manufactures/
I think phone manufactures should also get there head around the fact that I want them to sell me a phone. I don't want them to sell me a life style, I don't want them to own my life. I don't want them to dictate what SW I can run. I want to buy a phone and I then want to feel like its mine.
I don't think Apple could have gotten enough revenue from the operation to pay for a full nationwide network in any country bigger than San Marino but I was always suprised they never went down the MVNO route. Would have given Steve a lot of the control he's famous for loving....
Well, when Apple has sued every other electronics-manufacturing company out of existence for illegally using Apple's patents on the tendency of electrons to carry energy through conductive materials, the only choice you'll have is to buy a Jesus phone (or other Apple product) or go back to living in caves. That's kind of a big deal as far as I'm concerned.
Their own MVNO might have been an appealing model, particularly if they handled billing through iTunes with transparent roaming at local prices: use an iPhone in the UK, it's on 'iNetwork' which actually happens to be O2-backed; get off the plane in the US, you're still showing as being on 'iNetwork' which happens to be AT&T's hardware. Considering they got O2 to roll out EDGE in order to suppose the original iPhone, an MVNO agreement would hardly have been a big step.
Then again, marketing, selling and supporting tens of millions of handsets from scratch would have been a big step, particularly back before the Apple Stores had the scale they do now - and as an MVNO, they'd have to deal with all the number porting procedures, billing headaches etc themselves instead of saying "OK, O2, you buy these handsets from us for X then give us y% of the revenue" and watching the crates of hardware from China turn into cash in Apple's account.
"as an MVNO, they'd have to deal with all the number porting procedures, billing headaches etc themselves"
Do you not think at least one of the real operators would have been willing to offer a nearly-full-service but white label product for Apple?
Wed 4pm: "MVNOs are a way for the main operators to sell excess capacity ...The download speeds of Tesco/Giff Gaff vs O2 contract customers is a great example."
Wed 6pm: "Sounds plausible, especialy given the target markets, but is there any actual evidence?"
Thursday: <tumbleweed>
Do I detect at Wed 4pm the sound of a core operator employee hoping that his employer's corporate road warrior customers don't get themselves a bucketload of GiffGaff SIMs and save a fortune?
It's unlikely to happen much anyway, even if the MVNOs actually could be shown to be 2nd class traffic, because Corporate Purchasing typically don't work that way. But maybe they should (e.g. it might save Vodafone having to dodge quite as much tax).
[Your author here, like many elsewhere, was for many years a slave to massively overpriced sweetheart/kickback deals between corporate employer and contracted operator(s), yes including Vodafone. And when I say massive I mean MASSIVE]
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