This post was inspired by a debate taking place on the Mobile Monday London forum. It has never been this easy to predict mobile. It has become increasingly easy since the first release of MMS (picture messaging) in 2002, which almost revolutised how users consumed content on mobile phones.
We have some historical data to go from when trying to predict the next few years of Mobile – in terms of connection speeds to help mass adoption of Mobile Web anyway.
Trying to predict mobile in 2015 is a little too far for my liking. I’d have to lay on a bed and dream about something so far stretched that most would probably laugh at. Some of my greatest failures include not having the balls to execute ideas because of colleagues laughing at them – such as charging hotels and restaurants for online advertising. Long story which I won’t bore you with. Instead, I’ll bore you with another story about connection speeds. For the sake of the record, I’m not bragging – it’s easy to say you had ideas, it’s another to execute them.
Some historical data which may help.
During the early days of the Web I remember writing modem strings to help get the best out of 1200bps modems. Before that I was using them to download interest rates from a bank in Paris to a bank in Dublin – all I knew was that some machine made noise and it all just happened.
We were delighted to eventually see the delivery of 33.6k modems after having 28.8k for so long. We were told by BT that it was *technically impossible* to get anything faster down a phone line. Then, one day, BT came back and said “hey, we’ve managed to squeeze 56k by reducing the line noise”.
1200bps to 56k happened between 1995 (roughly) and 1997. That’s just 2 years.
In 2002 the rollout of Broadband helped to achieve a major spike in users on the Web. I wasn’t involved in that, but some of my friends were, and still are.
So, it took about 5 years to make a huge jump in speed to help accelerate mass adoption of the Web. If we consider that the growth in mobile technology (and possibly technology in general) today is just twice that of Internet technology during the mid to late 90’s, we should see a major spike in mass adoption for mobile web in about 2 to 3 years. This argument is boosted in my opinion, by our generation’s knowledge and experience and the newer generation’s expectations.
Explaining the benefits/possibilities of the Web during the early days was much more difficult than it is to explain the benefits/possibilities of accessing the Web via a mobile today.
The future is bright, the future is not Orange or any other Operator. If this isn’t realised soon, Operators will end up like AOL – i.e. going out of business holding onto old business models