LAS VEGAS-In this town, people refer to a large, varied repast-such as that offered in CTIA Wireless 2006’s opening-day keynote session-as a buffet. As with any ambitious spread, the keynote repast included a few tasty treats, something for everyone and a few items to pass on.
The Walt Disney Co. made its splashy entrance to the mobile virtual network operator space with its Disney Mobile MVNO, a suite of services and content that includes an intuitive set of parental controls for their kids’ phones, wrapped in the requisite smoke and fireworks, accompanied by-who’d a thunk it?-Mickey Mouse.
The big news there: Pantech, the just-under-the-radar South Korean handset vendor, will supply the Disney service’s first handset (the DMP100, priced at $60), to be followed by a more ambitious model with added features from LG Electronics Co. Ltd. (Pantech’s coup: an eight-foot tall mockup of its co-branded handset loomed at center stage, though Steve Wadsworth, president of Disney Internet Group, referred to it as a handset “you see everyday.” Disney’s CEO Bob Iger appeared briefly by video only; ironically, he was introduced by the Lovin’ Spoonful’s iconic song, “Do You Believe in Magic?”
The MVNO space, avidly sought by device vendors outside the largest five, may well spell the difference between survive and thrive for Pantech and others.
Passing down the buffet line, one potentially overlooked item came up when CTIA President Steve Largent questioned Kevin Martin, chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, who said that its upcoming advanced wireless service auction-scheduled for June-and 700 MHz auction-now coming under fire from various interest groups-should remain on track. Asked his opinion of the possibility that major, non-traditional players might bid on spectrum-Largent mentioned Microsoft Corp. and Google Inc.-Martin’s answer, essentially, was the more the merrier.
Masao Nakamura, president and chief executive officer of Japanese carrier NTT DoCoMo Inc., essentially reminded everyone with “personalization” and “3G” on their lips that his company has often led the field in both areas. DoCoMo’s new i-mode FeliCa services seek to combine telecom and non-telecom services with handsets assuming a wider role as “lifestyle infrastructure” that supports services or plays roles such as an e-wallet, credit card, apartment or office key. DoCoMo plans to migrate its UMTS-based networks to HSDPA this summer, improving download speeds, and move to HSUPA with improved uplink speeds by 2009.
Indeed, the race to embrace consumers’ abilities to tailor their service and content to their own tastes was the overt and underlying theme loosely running through the session, reflecting the industry’s stepped-up efforts to empower the end user now that voice is giving way to data as the wireless growth area.
This shift, acknowledged by many in the market, was downplayed by the lead-off speaker and CTIA chairman, Sprint Nextel Corp.’s Chief Operating Officer Len Lauer. Lauer used his time to deliver the usual, upbeat assessment of the industry. He used past predictions of the industry’s direction-which turned out wrong-to set up strawmen that he dutifully knocked down. Data is a fad, one analyst had written several years ago. (Collective, knowing chuckles between speaker and audience followed.) A little closer to the bone, Lauer asked rhetorically, perhaps mimicking a concerned analyst, “Will ARPU hold up? Will people really take to data?”
“We’ll prove them wrong in 2006,” Lauer said, noting the seemingly irrefutable appeal of cameras, gaming, music, streaming media and location-based services. And he took the inevitable swipe at regulation-he urged the FCC to take “a light touch” on data privacy requirements while slamming unscrupulous data thieves-and taxes.
“The focus,” he added-touching on the industry’s seemingly new-found theme-“should be on the users of the technology.” He added: “We’re erasing boundaries”-perhaps a nod to the concept of wired/wireless convergence, if not in the network, at least from the user’s perspective.
Indeed, an intuitive sense of the end-user’s needs lay at the heart of Disney Mobile’s new MVNO service. The American icon of family entertainment will offer parents the ability to set various parameters on their children’s phones such as blocking phone use at inappropriate times (school hours, for instance) or with inappropriate content or people, while enabling parents to locate their children and send them priority messages. Parents also can program limits to their offsprings’ usage patterns, precluding the dreaded, unexpected monthly bill. As for content, Wadsworth said that user customization would come over time-i.e., not when Disney Mobile begins online sales of devices and service in June.
The Disney Mobile presentation and focus on the end user contrasted with a presentation by Glenn Britt, Time-Warner Cable’s president and CEO, who offered no tangible news other than to reference his company’s recently announced joint venture with Sprint Nextel. “The customer is king,” he offered, and Time-Warner Cable and Sprint Nextel are “moving as quickly as we can.”
A sympathetic note was struck by the appearance of Karim Khoja, CEO of Roshan, an Afghanistan-based carrier that has built a business in the war-torn country, where the challenging terrain favors a wireless buildout over wireline. “If people can speak [to one another], they will not fight,” he suggested, somewhat optimistically, of the factions still battling for control of Afghanis hearts and minds. Ninety-nine percent of Roshan’s business is prepaid-“Try collecting a phone bill from someone toting an AK-47,” he joked, grimly.
