On Sat 9/8/2001 12:44 AM
turner@uvs.is Wrote:
>> Indeed. The thought of Vodaphone flying up to Tampere and arm
twisting
>> Nokia into making handsets to their liking is ludicrous.
Why exactly ?
It's a common statement that iMode model would NEVER work in Europe,
that may well be true, but what is the reason ? Government regulation
? Extreme dedication to civil liberties within society ? What ?
Anyway Vodafone may not need to arm twist Nokia as they will likely have
the Japanese manufacturers offering to custom build the phones.
Just as KPN does (CNN - 27 Aug)
By Vodafone's effective ownership of J-Phone isnt it also likely that
they will inheret some rather good relationships with the Japanese
handset vendors and take those deals back to Europe.
>> Further, European
>> mobile operators (I'll ignore the hapless American operators) appear
to be
>> greedy SOBs who have no intention of (and no supporting billing
>> infrastructure for) sharing revenue with content providers.
Its not a case of sharing the connection revenue or packet charges, but
of gaining additional revenue.
What they are sharing is [part of] additional revenue that they would
not otherwise have, and ONLY for sites that _can_ charge users for the
content by way of having content that is worth selling.
Its not so hard to SHARE revenue in that case and itas win-win for the
operators and content providers.
AND as the imfamous Japan Inc article pointed out its a much bigger with
for the operators so they have a very big incentive to impliment such a
system.
>> and no supporting billing infrastructure for
Could it be that they just didnt pull their finger out yet ? (perhaps
because the infrastructure is 18 months behind and WAP 1.x was an
impediment) and isnt that what DoCoMo is helping impliment through KPN.
In at least one case I know of (Vodafone UK) thay already have in place
(and have been working on it since 98 that I know of) much of the
billing infrastructure to on charge other services through a mobile
phone bill.
BT were thinking along similar lines in 1996 while they were working on
a kiosk system called TouchPoint (nothing to do with the Kiosk itself
but the billing proposals for the Kiosk were part of a bigger plan which
was very far reaching) though it was for domestic phone bills, not
mobile its a fair guess to say they would have progressed along this
line just a little in 5 years. ( I hope my NDA has expired by now !!)
Billing other stuff through a phone bill is quite a natural progression
if you think about it. The mobile operators everywhere have surely
considered this, and most will have made some preparation in the last
years. In a few cases I know of the necessary changes to their billing
architecture went in as a side project to Y2K efforts.
The only unique aspect of iMode is that it was the first time the
concept was implimented successfully on a large scale.
Time will tell.
Regards,
David Davies
www.intadev.com <http://www.intadev.com>
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Received on Sat Sep 8 04:04:58 2001