3G, the lost billions
Ever since mobile operators shelled out billions for those overpriced UMTS licenses they have been trying to convince everybody and his dog that 3G will bring fabulous services. Reality doesn’t seem to agree. 3G has been wobbling towards memory lane for a while now as an expensive service that never seriously saw the light of day and successors/alternatives like HSDPA are already being rolled out. In the mean time the market place has changed considerably too. High speed Internet access is now just a utility which is something operators are hardly comfortable with. Denying the consumer choice is like writing your own death warrant. Makes one wonder why any operator thinks they can lock in the consumer by forcing them to use their messenger solution instead of Google Talk, MSN, Yahoo etc. This whole IMS business and the thought process behind it seems to have derailed considerably. Time for a rude awakening and who would be better suited to do that than the world’s market leader in the GSM handset space: Nokia. At the 3GSM show Nokia showed the world’s first mass-market dual-mode wi-fi handset. The implications are major: no more expensive GSM calls if you are in the vicinity of a WiFi access point. Read more here.