EMOBILE: the mobile broadband revolutionist - Huawei

interesting video content on the Internet. Currently, more
users are on the Internet than watching TV during prime
time every day. It is no wonder that many professionals
have an email complex. The first thing they do at a place
with a network connection is to check their emails.
Grassroots: In the mobile Internet field, operators have
limited strength. It is not viable for operators to depend
on their own resources for innovation. True innovation
comes from the grassroots and a large number of small
companies. Currently, users are not satisfied with only
getting content from the Internet. They produce content
of their own; examples include the content, editing,
ranking and reviews on some most popular video websites.
Grassroots involvement pools the wisdom of ordinary
Internet users. One example is Goldcorp, a mining
company based in Toronto that was having trouble
locating exploitable gold and launched the “Goldcorp
Challenge”. Contestants found 110 possible mining
claims, 50 percent of which had not been previously
identified by the company. Over 80 percent of the new
claims yielded substantial quantities of gold. In fact, since
the challenge was initiated, an astounding eight million
ounces of gold have been found.
Social networking: Since Internet content is so rich,
users gather as communities and conduct and interact on
specific topics. This is the basis of the wildly-popular social
networking. For instance, an active user of Facebook on
average, stays in the community for over 3 hours, far more
than the time he or she spends on traditional portals.
Internet predicament
The changes in Internet consumption modes have
brought new challenges to operators. Operators have
endeavored to take the lead in mobile Internet services, for
example, proactive promotion of handset customization
(from hardware, operating system to chipsets). However,
operators have little control over terminals. Innovation
and operation related to handsets are controlled by
handset makers. The appearance of the iPhone remarkably
improved the use of the mobile Internet for users, but
operators do not have the ability to realize their ambitions.
Most operators lack comprehensive knowledge of
the Internet industry and the operation of the Internet
industrial chain. Moreover, operators lack the ability to
innovate and cannot offer standardized products to meet
the needs of the majority of their subscribers. Customers
place more importance on participation and information
selection. Operators have to cope with the “Long Tail” of
the Internet.
In fact, the Internet usage habits are established and
the emerging mobile Internet merely uses another display
and transmission pipe. Therefore, operators have to
depend on cooperating with terminal manufacturers. For
instance, China Mobile works with Samsung making
custom terminals and even wants to launch its own
handset operating system called the “Ophone”. In this
environment, handset makers are given more power when
negotiating with operators. Once handsets are in the
hands of consumers, the manufacturers can use them to
promote their own services, without paying attention to
the operators, like the Apple Store does.
On the other hand, operators have to take advantage of
being the transmission pipe. Mobile operators dislike being
called data pipes. While they suspect that certain risks on
the Internet will cause them to only be data pipes, just
providing the connection for handset users to access data
and doing nothing related to the Internet. If this is the
wave of the future, then mobile operators are re-treading
the path of fixed operators in an uneconomical manner.
From the commercial efficiency per bit (revenue per
bit for operator), broadband access has much lower
commercial efficiency per bit than SMS text messaging.
In 2007, the revenue of China Mobile from SMS was
approximately USD6.1 billion, while the revenue of
China Telecom for Internet service was over USD4.5
billion. Compared with SMS, broadband generates an
astronomical amount of traffic. Mobile operators do not
want to tread this path when the bandwidth of mobile
data is realized on the wireless spectrum that is already a
scarce resource.
Faced with these conditions, operators first think of
building a portal and only allow handset users to access the
Internet through the portal. The portal of China Mobile is
called Monternet. However, this mode was soon sloughed
off and increasingly more third party mobile Internet
websites have emerged. The “surf” key of iPhone allows
users to easily access third party websites. Portals like the
walled gardens of telecom networks will most likely not
succeed and possibly could even become extinct.
If this mode is not successful, operators have to
improve the value of data traffic by enhancing the value
of information through the telecom channels, becoming
“information experts” instead of just “communication
pipes”.
BizNavigator, Best Tone of China Telecom, and 12580
of China Mobile are all geared for precisely this type of
transformation. However, such services cannot be said to
be totally successful, because it is difficult for these value
added services to be standardized like a telephone. Users
have changing and diversified needs and operators cannot
respond swiftly to meet their mercurial needs. Operators
are in quite a predicament with value added Internet
FEB 2009 / Win-Win
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