How many of you, when you see the networks deliver a feature that you’ve been wanting for months (if not years), wonder why it took the phone networks so long to sort it out? Why it took them so long to ‘discover’ your favourite application?
Well, here’s a little secret. There’s every chance that the techies and geeks inside those networks know those tricks, the applications, and are using them already. The problem isn’t the implementation on the end-user’s device… it’s the end-user himself/herself.
A typical concern is cost, both how to extract money from the end user, and also in administration. It costs a lot to take a technical support call at a network (figures of £10 per call wouldn’t surprise me). When you consider that one call to tech support could wipe out the profit from a customer for a month, then the last thing the networks want to do is introduce something that requires a detailed setup ('detailed' being more than two options in the settings dialog). Anything that's rolled out needs to be a ‘point and shoot’ experience, and not ‘strip your rifle down between magazine changes.’
There’s also the question of capacity on the network – bandwidth in each cell is a finite resource, and with calls, SMS and MMS messages, 3G and GPRS data going on, there’s a lot to handle. And here’s one of the worries of instant messaging (which seems to be the networks' latest goose laying target). If you hook into your main IM lists and you change your online status, that’s a lot of people that need to be alerted to the change – so the solution that gives the easiest billing (SMS-based transportation of messages and presence) is just not fast enough to cope with this. Which means using a data connection – and that means that if IM was to be adopted by a significant number of users, the cell bandwidth problem could kick in.
There is, of course, the way they have chosen, and that’s to realise that the alpha-hackers (that’s us, in blue) might be quite vocal, but are actually a small minority of the users. We get to play, but we don’t have a tipping point effect on the infrastructure. The large volumes are further down the curve (in red), and it’s when they adopt something new that headaches will start to appear and need to be overcome.
So, while we might all get uptight and shout about why a certain application is so obvious that even a duck could do it, there’s more than head in the sand inertia from the networks. Those of us in the blue tend to troubleshoot ourselves, can cope with setting multiple servers for IM URL’s, can reset proxies and caches, and if we do call the data support lines, tend to brush through the first and second levels before explaining why the DNS routing via 3G is causing all sorts of headaches. Which is, strangely, easier to answer and solve than the typical ‘why can’t I stream BBC News on my mobile internet browser like in your advert’ call that happens with mainstream data services.
They don’t call it the bleeding edge for nothing.
Ewan Spence, 12 June 2007