One of the prime areas of focus for tech recently has been the tablet space. Tablets are far from new, and in fact some of the “new” models are more like reprises of earlier tablets in that they’re little more than a keyboard-less notebook. The iPad, of course, created an alternative vision of a tablet as a kind of over-fed smartphone, a device that’s all display and designed to be a conduit of information to the user with a relatively sparse capability to move data the other way. Some see tablets as consumer devices, and some like the model of enterprise use. The vendors are struggling with which model to support; ViewSonic expects to offer both 7-inch form and 10-inch form and both Android and Windows 7 (even dual-boot, so the rumor goes).
However the tablet goes, the big news will be the network and the impact of tablets on user behavior. Movement to tablets on a large scale means movement to ubiquitous wireless, but we’ll need to look hard at just what “ubiquitous” means. As I’ve noted, there’s an opportunity for hospitality-Fi networks to play an enormous role in future tablet networking. I think wireless providers and equipment vendors realize that and are trying to figure out how to promote a truly compelling case for 3G/4G wireless versus WiFi. The problem is that it’s going to be an uphill battle, because device vendors have everything to gain by pushing WiFi versions of their devices to get a larger near-term market share.
Behavior and mobility and devices all create an interdependence. The consumer isn’t set on tablet use, wireless models, or behavioral patterns at this point. That means that giving them support for a specific usage model can condition them to consume that model, whatever form that support may take. An explosion in tablet competition could empower a host of competitors, create a hospitality-Fi wave, and erode the business model for 4G. It could foster a different model for mobility that focuses on roaming data sessions between WiFi hotspots, independent of traditional mobility tools of the past, and of IMS. It could even erode the operators’ positions in the service layer, because WiFi is traditionally an OTT framework tied to no operator in a technical sense.
Alcatel-Lucent, whose quarter showed some real promise for growth, seems to recognize that. They announced a program with Eurozone provider KPN that demonstrates the exposure of provider network assets through Alcatel-Lucent’s Application Enablement and Open API program. This is the first large-scale success of a provider API program to deliver premium network features up the stack to the service layer. The application itself is still a bit simplistic, focusing again on QoS and bandwidth rather than on the more complex areas of identity, federation, CDNs, and application-service feature creation, but it’s a convincing demonstration that operators do have a path to monetize their underlying network assets either by offering high-level services that exploit them or by wholesaling them to somebody else. This kind of capability may be critical if things like tablets and hospitality-Fi start to erode the traditional mobile opportunity.