..So it’s goodbye Simpay, hello integrated broadband provider. Any takers?
The collapse of Simpay comes just after it seemed finally to have been making progress. You may remember this space congratulating the alliance on gathering all its members together in Cannes at 3GSM, and indeed announcing the first commercial services of the system in Spain, with newish member Amena.
Present at that meeting, and displaying no hint of their subsequent decision to pull out of the venture, was T-Mobile. Yet, last month,, T-Mobile pulled the plug on its participation, bringing the whole lot down with it, having apparently come to the conclusion that technically the solution wasn’t viable. This seems unlikely. Certainly T-Mobile, with its Deutsche Telekom background is known for its technical rigour, but then Vodafone aren’t exactly softies either. No, the answers would seem more likely to lie in the business model. After all, T-Mobile could probably have worn a little technical inelegance if they thought they would be making money regardless.
Of course, there have been several wise after the event commentators, somewhat conspicuous by their absence before T-Mobile’s withdrawal, describing how the venture could never have worked. How the trickle down payments based on the credit card merchant acquisition model couldn’t work in the mobile industry. How relying on pSMS as the technical carrier was doomed to failure. In the end, it seemed the alliance was always a few operator members light. Credit cards work because they are all but ubiquitous at point of sale. Large though the group operators were that had signed up for Simpay, the solution still had the look of a members’ club, rather than a truly open answer to the question of how to bill people’s mobiles for digital content resident outwith an operators’ portal. Also, perhaps, there was inevitably something slightly protectionist about the venture. Why would people wish to be billed to their mobile, just for something they are buying for their mobile? And then the venture would have also created a tiered system for content purchase, with operators tying premium content from large powerful providers within their portals, then a secondary tier on partner sites, perhaps still co-branding with the operators. Then the Simpay layer — effectively everything else — would effectively be handled as the bottom rung by operators which hardly lends a glowing seal of approval.
But we cannot be wise after the event here at Mobile Europe, or indeed it seems very often wise before it. We thought the intent made sense, even if the content was lacking. Another one to mark up to the “it seemed a good idea at the time” folder.
The growth of broadband wireless networks competing with UMTS should not bring too many shudders to operators or their suppliers. It’s an old mantra but a true one that the premium mobile operators can add is just that — their mobility. In Finland, in any case, the company that has won the license to build out rural coverage plans to resell to other providers — very possibly the mobile companies themselves who will get an element of rural wireless broadband coverage without having to build it out themselves. Of course, that may necessitate an element of dual mode Flash-OFDM/ GSM but as we are talking only about data in any case, a card to put in the laptop doesn’t seem too prescriptive. Secondly, there is UMTS TDD, a somewhat controversial player in the market because it can be accused of not yet being truly mobile, and because IP Wireless’ implementation stands accused to of being a proprietary system, notwithstanding the company’s efforts to position the solution under the IMT 200 umbrella. But note that the provider of UMTS TDD in the Czech Republic will be a mobile operator. T-Mobile is gunning for the residential broadband market, currently only at 2% penetration in the country. The benefits of tacking that onto mobility come later, but it’s very smart where the opportunity presents itself to be seen as the broadband provider, whether fixed or mobile. It’s really the same strategy as France Telecom announced a month or so ago, taking all its different brands under one roof to present a single front to the market. And hey, to us, at the moment, that seems like a good idea too. Oops.