Fear of a Dumb Pipe
Some quotes from luminaries at the Mobile World Congress:
“Twenty-five years ago Microsoft was a puppy,” explained Softbank CEO Masayoshi Son. “And everyone said ‘ah, you are cute!’ But then they became huge in the PC space, and the guys that made the computers, and built the infrastructure didn’t make much money. If the mobile industry is not careful the same thing will happen, and carriers will become dumb pipes,” he said.
“In the end, technology is not what matters: it’s services, it’s applications, it’s experiences,” Vodafone CEO Arun Sarin said during his keynote Tuesday. Carriers must offer subscribers a variety of ways to communicate–like SMS, email or social networking sites–the carrier must “be in all these places.” He added: “We must not allow ourselves to become bit pipes and let somebody else do the services work.”
With all due respect to Son-san and Mr. Sarin, as an end user, a dumb pipe is exactly what I want.
I don’t want services bundled with my access technology. I want to choose my own services.
I don’t want my access to be limited or filtered, or content being given priority over other content. I want all content to be served equally.
I don’t want my service provider to redirect failed DNS queries or to hijack my web session when a page can’t be found.
I don’t want my service provider inserting ads into my browsing session.
I want a simple bit pipe to use as I’d like. Nothing more, nothing less. Of course, you may offer me services, such as telephony and video over the bit pipe you provide and if they are good services I may choose to buy them. But don’t force me to do so. I prefer to spread my risk around.
Make your service sticky by making it un-sticky. Make it easy for me to do what I want with it. Don’t nag or remind me of your presence. Do all that and charge a reasonable rate and I’ll be a subscriber forever.