.
Speaking at the MobileBeat2010 conference in San Francisco on Monday, AT&T’s Chief Technology Officer John Donovan discussed convergence, the “consumerization of enterprise,” and the surge in mobile broadband, all while artfully managing to avoid the meat of the main issues faced by the carrier.
In a keynote entitled “What the boom in connected devices means for carriers,” Donovan, whose firm has faced vociferous criticism about the poor quality of its iPhone strained network, managed to blame the “flood of new chipsets, phones, and applications,” for all of the mobile world’s problems, although he did grudgingly admit a network component shortage had played a role too.
“It’s been a wild ride for us in the mobility space the past few years,” Donovan gushed adding, “we’re seeing a proliferation of devices that’s unprecedented.”
The surge in mobile data usage is perhaps a case of ‘be careful what you wish for,’ in AT&T’s case, with Donovan admitting, “When you provide mobility to people they consume it,” and noting the firm was carrying roughly half of all the mobile smartphone data in the US.
Retreating to safety behind a tsunami of banality, Donovan began citing “pretty profound growth rates,” and declared “we think this video wave is really starting to become big.”
Left uninterrupted to continue on his trail of trite, Donovan noted “We’re in the beginning of the growth curve, mobility is the foundation for consumption. There’s always a preference for mobility.”
Not content to leave it at that, he went on to say that mobilization was “shortening the distance between intention and action,” and that “people don’t want to search on a mobile device, they want to find.”
According to Donovan, we’re all becoming lazy, too. “People would rather sit on the couch and use their mobile than get up and use their computer,” he proclaimed.
Venture Beat’s host reporter then ventured a predictably hackneyed question about AT&T’s main challenges, to which Donovan answered it was “hard to narrow down to one choke point.”
“I’ll tell you the things it’s not been,” he dodged, slickly soundbiting, “it’s not been a capital problem, it’s not been conviction or commitment, because we have both.”
To that he added that AT&T would “move heaven and Earth” to satisfy customers’ insatiable urge for data, however much those urges may grow.
Indeed, Donovan noted the US was still in phase one, the “traditional data world,” poised to enter phase two or “application readiness,” followed by an unquantifiable phase three in 2014 which would see the amount of data usage in 2008 round down to zero in comparison.
Asked how the firm avoided being a dumb pipe, Donovan said his firm had to pay attention to everything from the apps all the way down to the chip, “because you can have a great experience on the software side, but a bad experience on the network and ultimately that leads to a failed device.” Hmmmm….we wonder whether Donovan would class the iPhone as a failed device, then.
Without any prompting, Donovan bizarrely felt the urge to add “We’re not a monopoly,” before going on to say AT&T wanted “healthy competition” and for “people to come in and try things.
“Sometimes they work, sometimes they don’t. We have to compete, we have to compete with everything we do, we’ll compete to some level on the app layer, more on the enablement layer, a lot on the network layer,” he said.
Speaking of layers, the AT&T CTO certainly seems to have a few of his own, telling the audience he was carrying no less than four devices on his person including an HTC Android, iPhone, Blackberry and a body sensor which monitors all his body stats constantly.
The more devices mature and evolve, however, the more the services that accompany them need to adapt, Donovan explained, noting that billing mechanisms still had a way to go before they reached the optimal model of, say, knowing when a device was being used for personal or enterprise use and billing accordingly.
Monetization of apps, said Donovan, was another area that required more attention and thought. “Until we find a healthy system where everyone gets paid and friction is low, we haven’t really reached the tipping point [of going from walled to open]” he told the audience adding, “the ecosystem has to mature for benefits to be spread evenly.”
But AT&T sees itself as something of an enabler with Donovan declaring “We need to be great at what we do, which is to provide the oxygen that allows everything to live.”
“We’re going to do a lot of things,” he said cryptically adding “We’ve historically been more of an invention lab than an innovation lab.”
Banal or not, there was certainly no faulting Donovan’s patriotism, as he slapped down a suggestion that Japan was perhaps more advanced in all things mobile.
“The US has been a clear leader when it comes to phones, designs and applications,” he snapped, adding “acceleration has been very healthy.”
