Another dumb pipe column

For those watching the wireless industry over the past decade or so, the branding emphasis has always been squarely on the carrier. You purchased service from your carrier, you purchased phones from your carrier (in some cases carrier-branded phones), and you accessed your carrier’s WAP deck. In each transaction, it was you and your carrier.
As the industry evolved and new services became possible, carriers attempted to perpetuate this situation. Carriers began offering branded versions of downloadable music services and access to mobile TV and videos.
This style of business, wherein a carrier would place its brand over a particular offering, continued throughout the location-based services market, the Wi-Fi arena, the field for e-mail on feature phones, and elsewhere.
Today, the situation appears to be changing, and not just for techies. Indeed, I just found out my aunt, my brother in law and my wife’s uncle all own iPhones. This is a surprising – and somewhat disconcerting – discovery. After all, they’re regular people, so shouldn’t they be toting a carrier-branded flip phone?
There are several converging trends that will at least diminish the carrier’s branding power, if not depose it altogether.
Smartphones are gaining a greater share of the cellphone market than ever; Gartner found that the smartphone market in North America grew a whopping 68% in the third quarter over the same period a year ago. Almost by definition, smartphones place a branded operating system – be it BlackBerry or Windows Mobile – between a user and a carrier.
App stores are springing up all over – and most are outside a carrier’s purview. Seceding control of application and service distribution is a critical change in how carriers do business.
And finally, and perhaps most importantly, regular people are beginning to wake up to this new landscape, and embrace it.
After all, if members of my own extended family – generally denizens of small towns who embrace Ford trucks and warily eye sushi – are buying iPhones, it is indeed a new world.