AT&T’s decision to buy NextWave is clearly a gamble, though insiders tell me that it’s not as much a wing and a prayer as it might seem. NextWave has a bunch of 2.3GHz spectrum (WCS or Wireless Communications Services) that was never certified for mobile use, and the payoff for the deal seems linked to an appeal to the FCC based on safeguards proposed by Sirius XM and AT&T. This would open that spectrum for 4G, if the FCC approves. There were 128 licenses sold to 17 bidders, so there are others who have spectrum to sell or to use when and if the FCC clears the usage.
The truth is that we DO need more spectrum and better coverage because, as I’ve noted before, mobile is changing its face. In the past, the goal was to create a poor stepchild of wireline that could be used when we weren’t tethered, a kind of backfill communications strategy. Today, mobile is a mechanism for supporting ubiquitous access to online services, increasingly cloud services, and building entirely new relationships between ourselves and information. These relationships are possible only because mobile really is (or can be) with us always, and so we can mold new behaviors around it.
What those new behaviors might be is still an open question. Apple has demonstrated, via Siri, that we can view mobile broadband as a kind of personal supergeek, somebody who can get us what we want and answer all our questions. So far, the great majority of wants and questions are fairly conventional, not in the least because Siri isn’t yet capable of complicated syntax. Down the line, we can expect agents like it to take a much bigger role in our minute-to-minute living, but it’s going to take applications to accomplish that, and it’s not clear that operators have a real vision of the mobile/behavioral future.
Apple was two things; a trend-setter and an impeccable trend-reader. The former role was due in no small part to the fact that they could embody the new mobile age in a cool gadget or two. But once they did that, they were able to figure out how the ecosystem had to evolve to support the opportunity. Telcos typically respond to direct sales requests not to ecosystemic trends, so they’re far from expert or confident in addressing this brave new world of mobile. Which is why, even though mobility/behavioral symbiosis is seen as a major monetization opportunity and that mobile is still the primary focus of capex, mobile projects in monetization lag all of the others by a substantial margin.
In some ways, this is a new opportunity—for vendors. The content wave, the monetization projects aimed at multi-screen, has largely left the beach for the open sea and the operators have picked other paths than following the vendors’ product strategies. The cloud wave is primarily an IT phenomena, and while there are enormous opportunities to be had in customizing the fit between the cloud and the network (via SDN principles) vendors have so far failed to find the right path. Eventually they’ll lose the opportunity to IT guys too. But in mobile? There could be giant bucks there, and also an opportunity for the equipment vendors who lack a strong mobile story (Cisco and Juniper) to create one.
I think vendors are missing a major truth here, which is that nobody is going to build silo service layers on top of converged networks. There is going to be ONE ARCHITECTURE for hosting advanced service features. This is a win-all, lose-all sort of thing, in other words. If you insist on a kind of recipe for success in this one-layer-for-all model, it’s going to be a combination of cloud, SOA, and SDN.