Sometimes I get a little tired of hearing the question 'What value does the mobile network (carrier) add?' when discussing the relationship between the Customer, who owns a mobile phone, and their experience and relationship with it. In the past few years with the explosion of 'smart' phones, increasingly mobile networks are losing their relationship with the Customer as it gradually gets prised away by the likes of Apple and Google via the iPhone and Android.
Many years ago, location was the golden egg of mobile phone networks. Mobile network operators would be able to sell access to a Customer's location to application providers and make money in the application space. Well that didn't quite work out did it? Phones will now gladly present their location directly to the application developer and so bypass the network altogether.
The same can be said of payments. Customers will always want to pay on their mobile phone bill as it's so simple right? Along comes Apple with 10's of millions of dedicated iTunes Customers who again simply by-pass the network and bill direct to their credit cards. Thankfully other market place owners don't have such a captive market, who have registered their credit card details via a PC, so there may well be a chance for the carriers to wretch some payments, on Customer bill, back. In fact this relationship between application developers and network should be rewarding for both sides for a change.
When it comes down to it though the entire world does not own a smart phone. In fact the majority of the worlds' mobiles are not smart, and although it is clear that growth in the smart phone arena is massive, the rest of the world should not go unsupported when it comes to tools to communicate. Well guess what they don't. There is this thing that is common across almost every mobile phone and mobile carrier globally. Something that was invented to allow base station installers to send test messages that has exploded into possibly the standard way of communicating between friends with mobile phones. That's right. The simple 160 character SMS.
Given the volume of messages sent globally every year, and the volume of messages sent individually:
- The average US teen sends 3334 SMS a month
- There were 6.1 trillion SMS sent in 2010. That's 200,000 SMS sent every second.
- Fast Society is a free iPhone app that groups contacts into an instant, short-term team, combining group text messaging and one-touch conference calling. – iPhone only
- GroupMe makes life easy for you and your groups with free group texting. It’s your real life network, in your pocket. – also does conf calls from the number assigned to the group. Very nice.
but on the whole there are very few that engage with SMS other than using it as a sharing distribution channel. OK there is nothing wrong with this, but there is so much more that could be achieved. Sure the development of smart phones leads to exciting new access mechanisms to engage Customers but SMS is almost universal. So why are there precious few SMS based applications as opposed to several 100,000 web based apps? Because the distribution mechanism costs! Sending an SMS has a cost that someone has to pay. In the US the recipient pays. In most of the rest of the world the sender pays. In Italy, during the 2006 World Cup the 3 network paid its Customer to receive text messages. This of course provided an excellent hacking opportunity for canny Italian 3 subscribers to hack web based services to send them SMS messages such that they would be paid by their network! Cheeky! Very Cheeky indeed! That being said, there is a cost for SMS that is either paid for by the Application provider, or the users.
So service providers cannot afford to distribute via SMS. Herein lies a very clear statement that can be addressed by the mobile networks. Mobile Networks go out of our way to entice Customers with massive packages of SMS'es that they can use each month, or they are given away for free. Why then, as we control the distribution mechanism, and access to it, and knowing that our Customers use the distribution mechanism so heavily, do we not go about making tools and products to allow our Customers to engage with their favourite distribution mechanism. If access was free you can rest assured that this would have been done years ago by application developers. Hey guess what. At the moment it is not free and the only folks who can have success in large scale SMS messaging application development are the mobile networks.
There are tens of use cases that I can think of at the drop of a hat, outside the garden shed SMS alert applications, that simply could not be delivered in a cost effective method by the application developer. I am convinced that if they could that they would have done so long ago. Why then, when the mobile networks are continually being asked what value do they add, don't the networks act to try and provide value in a communication and distribution service that they have complete control over? I am really not sure. Is it simply that we are blinded by the app ecosystems that have exploded in the past few years. Is it that we are simply missing a trick? I have my thoughts, and need to try to do more to do something about it. The point being if you own the distribution mechanism I think its a crime not to exercise it, other than giving your Customers bundles of messages to use each month. If you don't the next thing you know Google will have their own SMSC and take another chunk of your Customer. Will google Voice move into further SMS functionality on top of SMS to Email? If they do you can rest assure that there will be some interesting applications that come with it.
Time to act on and play with the resources that the Mobile Networks still have!
Cheers
m
