Who Controls Wireless Access? Carriers, Internet players or the End User?

One vision of wireless Utopia is ultimate control in the hands (andhandsets) of the user, moving away from a world where the majority ofthe market is controlled by a few powerful carriers. Evangelists dreamof plenty of free or inexpensive bandwidth, a choice of flexibledevices, and the ability to use whichever cool communications applications appeal. The signs are promising: the proliferation of smartphones continues, myriad new access technologies - WiMAX, LTE,WiFi mesh, 4G, UWB and even software-defined radio (SDR) - are comingover the horizon, and new phone features like GPS, RFID and motion sensing are begging to be exploited as well. So what's the delay?Policymakers seem to be taking tentative steps towards flexibility -witness the FCC's 700MHz open-access requirements, and the European Commission's stance on tech-neutrality and spectrum trading. But thefact remains that the vertical model of bundled mobile access andservice remains entrenched, with conventional cellular subscriptions nearing the 3bn mark, about 70% of whom are on basic prepaid GSM. It's worth remembering too that the 'closed' non-IP world of SMS will hit the $100bn revenue mark in 2007. This presentation looks at the aspirational objectives of wireless visionaries on the one hand... but tempers their enthusiasm with apragmatic analysis of mobile market realities: worries about interference and "the tragedy of the commons", slow-evolving spectrum policy, handset power & useability constraints, and timeline and scale economies in RF and silicon development. It presents a realistic view of what will happen when - and how this will impact innovators lookingto create next-generation mobile communications applications.