Some Random Moblog

There is one thing that makes the iPhone an incredibly powerful device, which at the same time makes it incredibly annoying.

Cloud computing.

When you’re permanently connected to the Internet, a whole lot of opportunities open up. Most obviously, you can get the latest information- news, sports, emails, Facebook and so on. At the touch of a button (well, screen) you can know the latest goings on anywhere in the world.

But there are also services like RSS feeds, which make it quick to access a wide range of information from a variety of sources- Google Reader and Newsgator in particular are well worth taking 5 minutes to set up. Social networking applications like Facebook and Twitter keep you up to date with the latest goings-on with people you are interested in.

But it also opens up new opportunities. Suppose you’ve got some notes saved on your work computer that you’d like to check, or photos on your home computer that you’d like to show someone, or a bookmark to a web page that you’d like to see. By saving them online, using something like Flickr or GigaOm) has announced that he is “retiring” his iPhone- not because of a problem with the phone, but because his network is failing to provide an adequate network coverage.

My guess is that it’s a matter of time until Apple start either enabling this kind of functionality for 3rd party apps to download information in the background, or extending the applications that they provide themselves as part of the iPhone operating system. Other smartphones like Blackberry and Windows Mobile enable it, and more and more services that really need this kind of functionality are bound to start appearing.

So the devices are here already. What’s missing is network coverage. The problem here lies with the telecoms industry. In the UK, we have five mobile networks- O2, Vodafone, Orange, T-Mobile and H3G. All five networks have 3G coverage, and all but H3G have 2G networks running in parralel. All five networks are aiming for maximum coverage, yet none are achieving it alone.

As the final few percent of households need to be covered, the return on investment for all five networks to independantly cover every inch of the United Kingdom gets lower and lower. The efficiency of the networks also gets lower- while the O2 network might be full where I want to use it, Vodafone could have plenty of space in their section of bandwidth. (Ironically, users from overseas aren’t tied to a single network- they can happily switch from one to another. An option not available to the UK consumers who make up the majority of their revenues.)

One solution to this problem would be sharing of networks. T-Mobile and H3G are already planning on doing this to maximize their coverage for mobile data- extending together into areas they don’t cover, and removing masts where they have excessive and unnecessary overlap. To me, this seems like the only way to move things forward- the amount of data being transmitted is bound to increase as both phones and laptops become increasingly active mobile data devices. The networks, however, have finite limits to how much information they can carry.

So the industry-led solution has gone as far as it can. Lots of people have made and spent lots of money on mobile networks. How the industry will progress, via sharing networks rather than hoarding spectrum space, is going to be a very interesting area to watch over the next few years.