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Being there
Alex Leslie - Sep 23, 12:39 PM
When you watch a tennis match from the comfort of your own chair you tend to justify it by saying that you get a much better view, you miss the traffic and the food is probably better anyway. If you actually go to the tennis match you tend to justify this by saying the atmosphere is much better, you see things that you would never see on TV and you might be there for an important moment in history.
I did not go to 4G World. I sat in my comfortable chair, got a much better view, I missed the traffic and the food was probably better.
I did not, of course, get the atmosphere (that seems to have been excellent) and almost certainly missed things but I have followed blogs and read twitter feeds and articles from people who were there. There were articles about the fact that 4G is not about speed because the people who will be using 4G expect speed, they will only notice it if it is not there.
3G was, or is, mainly about speed, 4G is about something different. It is vastly complex, it is an ecosystem that allows….well, anything to happen in it.
And, guess what? It seems from the blogs and tweets and articles that the discussions at 4G World were missing something – the business model discussion, the ‘where is the money coming from’ discussion, the ‘what about billing?’ discussion.
It is amazing how we do not learn. When 3G was still an idea (and 3mps was being whispered about with awe) I rang up the UMTS Forum and said ‘how far have you got with thinking about billing and 3G’ and they said ‘it is just data’ and I said ‘it might be data on the network but actually it is music and news feeds and games and a host of things that have very different values to customers and we need to be able to bill for all of those things’.
There was silence for a while and then we formed a group within the UMTS Forum to look at business models and billing and customer service.
If those conversations were important with 3G, then how much more important are they in the 4G context now that the mobile internet – and whatever it becomes – is a reality?
I then wondered what the issues really are in 4G and found a good starting point in the list of news stories on BillingViews itself – these are the news items that I selected in the last six weeks:
• Mobile phone market data
• Mobile web sites make the grade
• Europe and global broadband stats
• The potential of smart posters
• Downturn economy, upturn fraud
• Beware what you post
• Mobile broadband explodes, what happens to the content
• There’s data all around me….
• Bad service loses customers – and money
• The rise and rise of mobile gaming
4G to me is a mixture of all these things – of mobile penetration, mobile web sites that make the grade, broadband backbones, innovation, fraud, big brother, content management, business intelligence, customer service and compelling content.
We must, of course, bear in mind that we may not be able to ‘get there from here’ as the saying goes. As the last few BillingViews interviews with operators have shown the day to day struggles in the billing room may be too enormous to win and therefore we will not be able to address 4G properly.
The alternative is to create a billing app – rather like Optus has.
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