Now it’s operators v handset makers
The battle for control of your mobile phone is about to enter an interesting stage. You may think that you are in charge. After all, you press all the buttons. But in reality the operators have been calling the shots for years. They have been trying to keep you within their walled gardens of paid-for services and charging by the amount of data consumed, leaving you with open-ended bills. They have even been fiddling with handsets to discourage use of the wireless connection appearing in an increasing number of handsets that can make near-free phone calls if you are in a Wi-Fi area.
This is understandable in terms of a desire to recoup the billions shelled out on 3G licences, but unacceptable when they pretend this is what consumers want. What consumers want is cheap phone calls and affordable music downloads from the web. They don’t want to find out that the 99p track they downloaded ends up costing them £10 because operators have charged them for all the data passing through their networks.
This is why operators are up in arms about Nokia’s upcoming N81 “music phone”. It will offer what is being hyped as a seamless music download service that could gobble up some of the operators’ revenues. If Apple, with its brilliant iTunes, is moving into the phone business then we should be unsurprised that phone companies are moving into the music business.
Nokia, which sells 1bn phones a year, is already the world’s biggest supplier of mobiles, cameras and MP3 players. Its move into music downloads could make its long-held ambition to capture 40% of the world mobile phone market (against a current 38%) less of a pipe dream that it seemed a year ago. Mobile music is potentially a far bigger market than cameraphones because listening to music is a more continuous experience than taking snaps. And surveys show that users want to download tracks to their phones as well as, or instead of, sideloading them from a computer at home.
Nokia reckons that all the technology is now in place and that the battle is now over design and usability. This is why Nokia has extended its links with archrival Microsoft to use the latter’s PlayReady digital rights management (DRM) technology which enables music, games or videos to be shared between devices in a platform-neutral way. Although content access (the new euphemism for DRM) is still restrictive, it is much less so than before and could be popular with punters.
Operators argue that they have to subsidise the handsets and don’t want phone manufacturers muscling in on their turf. To which Nokia replies that operators don’t have to subsidise handsets (it doesn’t happen in some countries) and no one is stopping operators doing what others are now doing in providing affordable music downloads and the ability to abandon your Sim card to make calls from your phone through the internet. Nokia rightly argues that if the operators don’t provide these services then other companies will provide them instead.
They already are. During my summer holiday in France I tested yet another VoIP service (from WiFiMobile) offering voice calls over the internet using my Nokia N80. Phoning Britain (without a Sim card) worked well for nearly all calls. It cost 2p a minute to phone a fixed line anywhere in the world or 14p a minute to UK mobiles (after paying a monthly fee of £7.99). The catch is you have to phone from a Wi-Fi hotspot. However, Wi-Fi is slowly being rolled out across Britain, though implementation of the more powerful WiMAX, with a longer reach, is hampered by lack of suitable spectrum. Meanwhile, operators had better prepare to offer more cheap Wi-Fi phone deals as well as music packages because, if they don’t, others will. Led by giants such as Nokia.
Read the article from The Guardian here.
