Re:Viewing 2001: Mobile operators must open their minds

If the next stage in the evolution of mobile is to be a success operators must open their minds and their networks to new ideas and partners. Otherwise, our correspondent Ben King will be suicidal a year from now.

It's lucky videophones aren't essential - because it doesn't look like we'll be playing with them for at least another year.

2001 was a delay Odyssey for the mobile phone industry. It set itself a plethora of impossible deadlines and spent the year comprehensively missing them.

Just think, last Christmas NTT DoCoMo was still claiming that it would start selling phones in May. More implausible still, BT subsidiary Manx Telecom was seriously claiming it would be broadcasting video clips of the TT motorcycle races on mobile phone handsets (http://www.silicon.com/a44378 ). Spain was still insisting that all its 3G licence winners cover every major city by August (http://www.silicon.com/a44082 ).

The fact that they missed these deadlines only shows what a ridiculously optimistic bunch of people were running and regulating the telecoms industry in 2000. With hindsight, it's pretty obvious we had more chance of seeing Bill Gates give it all up and start a career as a cabinet maker than picking up a location-sensitive, dual-mode 3G phone before 2004.

As the great Morrissey once said, these things take time. W-CDMA (the technology behind most 3G rollouts) is fiendishly complex. It will take a good few years before it really becomes widely established. The handsets are not ready, consumers aren't ready and network operators have no idea how to market and make money from 3G services.

Still, despite the succession of disastrous headlines and falling sales, the last year has seen progress made on all these fronts. SMS and even WAP services are growing in sophistication and popularity and consumers are getting increasingly used to them.

Technical innovations, from new phones to intelligent mobile routers and middleware technologies, are increasingly appearing on the market (http://www.silicon.com/a49474 ).

But most significantly, the mobile networks themselves are slowly learning how to start behaving like internet companies instead of telco behemoths.

Instead of just spending money to rake in punters and watch cash flow from voice calls, mobile networks will have to turn into thriving ecosystems, with hundreds of different partners using different business models to supply different services to everyone from travelling salesmen to Pokémon-loving school kids.

There are some encouraging signs that the mobile phone operators are beginning to do this, taking the first long and tortuous steps in changing the way they think.

International companies such as mmO2 (as we are now going to have to learn to call it), Orange, T-Mobile and Vodafone have realised they need to cut their partners a better deal. They will have a hard enough task getting 3G networks and handsets to happen without trying to get their head around the mysterious alchemy that makes compelling internet content.

The signs are that they are starting to do this and if they continue it will be the best news the mobile internet has had in a while (http://www.silicon.com/a46174 ).

For example, the industry is still in shock from the disaster of WAP, which was poorly sold by networks that didn't understand how to market it. It led to a great deal of consumer disappointment. That was nearly two years ago but still the industry is reluctant to put its weight behind what should be the next great advance in wireless technology - GPRS.

Sensibly, it is not going to market it as GPRS, an acronym so dull it makes WAP sound sexy. Indeed, the reaction has been so extreme that no one seems very keen to market GPRS at all (http://www.silicon.com/a43934 ).

This isn't necessarily a problem. Most of the marketing for NTT DoCoMo's relatively successful i-mode mobile internet service in Japan was done not by DoCoMo itself but the plethora of independent companies selling services over DoCoMo's network.

Rather than selling a network technology, they're selling ring tones or daily manga cartoon strips or horoscopes. And if you want them it so happens that you need to buy an i-mode phone as well (http://www.silicon.com/a48981 ).

What to expect in the New Year? More and more people will have GPRS-enabled phones, probably without knowing it. We may even see the first mobile cult phenomenon like the ones that crop up on the internet from time to time - a mobile Friends Reunited perhaps. Hutchison 3G certainly knows what's likely to hit the 3G spot - but it's for adults only (http://www.silicon.com/a48465 ).

There will be more delays, which aren't even very exciting news any more. Expect some blood in the boardroom, too - mergers, acquisitions, and heads on the block. mm02 is a prime candidate for a takeover or merger, and there will certainly be other shenanigans in the City. Hopefully we won't see a big bankruptcy but we can't guarantee it.

We should also see Hutchison 3G's debut on the market (http://www.silicon.com/a49835 ). We wish them well but the challenge they and the whole of the industry faces is awesome. Still, we're optimistic that the future of the mobile industry will be bright, if not necessarily Orange.