Rage Against the Machine
There are significant barriers to entry in the mobile communications sector. Starting a new mobile network is expensive and tightly regulated; radio spectrum is a scarce resource.
The result of this can be clearly seen amongst our current crop of mobile operators. They are hugely traditional in outlook and they protect their primary revenue streams (voice and SMS) whilst drip feeding enhanced data offerings to the market.
In this post over at SMS Text News, Ewan Mcleod vents forth on the organisational inertia that is stopping entrepreneurs from innovating in the mobile sector, and provides a very good illustration of what things could be like.
This is one of the few areas where I support more regulation - but it would be regulation to open up networks, enforce horizontal separation of concerns and ensure open access at some level to the mobile networks. Today’s operators are not cutting it.
The mobile sector could be supporting a whole host of new industries and applications - if we have difficult economic times ahead then it is essential that entrepreneurs be allowed to innovate and create value with as few obstacles as possible. Sadly this is not currently the case.
1 year ago