Foundation

118World2000 Network operators are not alone, however, in wanting to forge themselves a place on mobile Internet portals;other players are equally eager to gain a foothold on this market:- manufacturers have also taken the initiative of creating their own portal. Such is the case of Nokia, andits Nokia Club portal, which has signed a number of partnership agreements with service providers suchas CNN, Amazon, AOL… for offering turnkey solutions to mobile operators and new entrants alike.Terminal manufacturers may team up with software firms with the goal of operating specialised portals;- specialised retailers (PhoneHouse, Unicom,….) and, more generally, large retail chains, are developingmobile portal offers to rival mobile network operators;- traditional portal operators (i.e. those found on the web) also intend to be present on the mobile market.Here, they have the advantage of expertise in content development and existing consumer knowledge oftheir brand;- content providers, particularly large communications groups (CNN, TF1…), software editors (IBM,Oracle…) and even car manufacturers such as PSA (in collaboration with Vivendi );- the many start ups which, in Europe, saw in WAP the chance to exploit a new bouquet of services wereparticularly hard hit by the market's sluggish beginnings, and the insistence with which operators soughtto control the market. The last point was the subject of much debate throughout 2000.Operators were accused of holding their subscribers hostage by locking the mobile terminals that weremarketed as part of a package. This "locking" consists in the pre-configuration of the mobile terminal in sucha way that the web can only be accessed via the mobile operator's gateway. All mobile Internet connectionsgo by way, then, of the manufacturers' or operators homepage. Following complaints from independentportals, and under pressure from the regulator (the obligation in France, for instance, to indicate the phonenumber which allows users to reconfigure the portal, as well as a similar decision handed down by theEuropean Commission to limit Vizzavi's exclusivity practices), subscribers are now able to access all mobileportals.This issue concerning the opening up of mobile Internet content, rather comparable in fact to the debate inthe US over open cable access, brings us back to questions surrounding not only the legitimacy, but also theeconomic efficiency, of operators' vertical integration strategies: how far can they and must they go incontrolling content?By way of a conclusionIt appears highly likely that the year 2000 will be remembered as the year when decisions of a structural naturewere taken, shaping mobiles' future and, more generally, the telecoms industry itself, even though it is stillhard to fully measure the impact that these decisions will have on the landscape in the years to come.Over the last few months, Europe has focused particularly on the revenues that are likely to be generated fromthe mobile-Internet convergence: over 130 billion € for UMTS licences and an at least equivalent sum forbuilding the networks. The emergence of the mobile Internet market via WAP proved much more difficult thanexpected. Faced with the prospect of additional revenues, which would be only gradually generated, while thevoice ARPU is continually decreasing, anxiety has set in. In light of the debts incurred or expected, this anxietywas first felt by the financial markets, investors and banks which, after having contributed to the entirelyunreasonable valuation of the mobile Internet market, now intend to limit their share of the risk. Naturally, thegeneral state of alarm hides a wide diversity of contexts, depending on the operators and the national marketsin which they have invested. It is therefore possible that a new consolidation phase in the sector will comeabout.© IDATE www.idate.fr