Challenging Mobile Industry Norms (2008)

In 2008, while working on Telecom New Zealand’s WCDMA network, I sent a note to the CEO challenging two ideas I kept hearing across the mobile industry:

“Voice is the number one service.”

“The telco should control applications to manage the customer experience.”

“Managing the customer experience” was often a polite way of saying “build a walled garden”.

My response was characteristically blunt:

“Voice is NOT the Number 1 Service.” and

“The Telco CANNOT control user experience.”

I described how my own mobile use was dominated by messaging, SMS, Twitter, Facebook and email, then asked why.

My answer was simple: “Because I can :)”

I could download the applications I wanted, and, as I noted at the time, “none of these applications, other than SMS, were supplied by the Mobile Operator”.

I also observed that “more and more people are communicating in a one-to-many manner”.

Looking back eighteen years later, much of that happened.

Phones became computers we carry everywhere. Apps replaced operator portals. Messaging and social media changed how we communicate. And telcos do not decide which applications customers use.

Voice did not disappear. It remains widely used and operationally critical, but it no longer drives the mobile market.

I also suggested treating Facebook and Twitter commercially like SMS. It was 2008, remember. Telcos briefly tried that through zero-rated social data, but it was never going to scale. There are simply too many apps for an operator to monitor and decide which should receive different treatment. In many countries, net neutrality rules also restrict operators from favouring one lawful app over another. The market settled on a much simpler answer: apps became data traffic.

What I did not fully anticipate was where the value would go.

Telcos built increasingly capable and larger capacity networks, while most of the innovation, customer attention and money moved to Apple, Google, Meta and other application providers.

Now the industry is looking for new value through APIs, quality of service, network slicing and edge computing.

But the lesson from 2008 still applies. A network feature matters only when it solves a real customer problem and helps the complete service work.

Nobody wakes up wanting a network slice or an application at the edge. They want a service they can rely on.