Mind Meld

SAN FRANCISCO – The CTIA I.T. show always brings together the best of the enterprise market and the best of the entertainment space to push mobile deployments in both arenas. Data continues to produce a bigger piece of carriers’ revenues, but mostly due of text messaging and simple applications, not because subscribers are consuming a lot of downloadable content.
So we have to ask ourselves, what’s holding back bigger data adoption rates? The networks are in place; the devices are sophisticated; the users are becoming savvier every day. And there are a bunch of cool applications out there. Maybe that’s part of the problem; there are so many applications it’s difficult to stand out. Every great idea faces intense competition from others – either the same idea with a different twist or another equally neat application with an entirely different purpose.
A variety of companies, and the operators themselves, are addressing that piece of the puzzle.
Is the pricing model for data consumption wrong? Have we reached our collective pricing limits? I don’t know anyone who is spending less on cellphone service today than they were a few years ago.
Is the market still too fragmented? One company sent me an e-mail earlier this week touting its mobile football application. I was excited to try it out until I realized it was for the iPhone, which I don’t own.
Does the industry need a killer app (even though most analysts and industry insiders agree there is no killer app – that mobility is itself the killer app).
Should we just be patient and let the market grow naturally?
I don’t think there is one answer, but perhaps a variety of issues stand in the way to increased data adoption.
Educating the marketplace matters, though.
Apple educated the mass market that a handset could access the Internet, then it taught the market that 3G speeds matter. Now it likely will educate people on how to find useful applications.
Will other operators and device manufacturers also increase efforts to show users what they can do in a mobile environment?
The industry wants customers to consume more mobile data, and events like the I.T. show are great at bringing together bright minds to try to figure out these questions.