Social Media Will Beat Mobile Phone Operators

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Social media beats OSs, handsets and operators?

This shift could also form part of the changing dynamics for mobile operators, according to Ray Anderson of Bango, a company which sits behind the scenes handling money transactions for mobile services like the BlackBerry AppStore.

He’s seen expectations of the power brokers in mobile shift from Bill Gates back in 1999, to the operators and their walled gardens in 2001, to handset makers – and Apple in particular – in 2005, and “only now is choice starting to win out,” he said.

It’s possible that the choice simply moves the focus to a different set of players: Google, Facebook and the social media operators, who are taking over the front of the screen on the phone, and increasingly making the operator’s role into a data pipe.

Without making any phones, Google could dominate the user experience, providing voice, video and text communications regardless of the operator or hardware underneath. Facebook could do the same without even having to provide an operating system.

“It is the ecosystem not the operating system that is important,” said Enrico Salvatori, Qualcomm’s European vice president – interestingly looking at least two levels higher than his company’s specialisation, silicon.

And the move to domination by social media players could route around a final problem suggested by Houston Spencer, marketing vice president at Alcatel Lucent. “The cycles of innovation in applications are orders of magnitude less than those for service providers,” he said.

Operators humbled?

If operators can accept that, they still have the power that incumbent operators have over the local loop. Whatever the social media ecosystems want to do over their networks, they still need to pay for network bandwidth.

So in between the economic pressures of providing data services, and the demands of apps on top of it, operators will settle into a less obvious role. They may merge (like T-Mobile and Orange) or share networks. They will still be there – but the social apps will rule.

The Future of Wireless conference will be held by Cambridge Wireless in Cambridge, UK, on 27 to 28 June.