Debating the future of open mobility

SAN FRANCISCO — Will the future of the open mobile Internet be a horizontal plane where consumers root about for applications and content, much like they do today on the wired Web? Or will it be more vertical, a collection of competing app stores and content portals managed by the carriers and other service providers? Will the stand-alone application sitting on top of an operating system be the default method to access mobile data? Or will the mobile browser achieve a similar prominence to its status on the wired Web, becoming the primary repository for cloud applications?

Those were the questions explored on the first day of the Open Mobile Summit, as telecom and networking industry executives fielded questions from developers about the future of the mobile Internet.

Cole Brodman, chief technology officer for T-Mobile (NYSE:DT), said he is convinced that the embedded application will reign supreme for some time, regulating browser-based apps to an important but secondary role. The reason is something he called “glancability,” or ease of access and relevance. Applications that push information that runs front-and-center on the home screen of the device are more adapted for the mobile lifestyle, Brodman said, while browser applications and content require a user to seek out information. Those apps allow customers “to be very mobile and live their life without having to constantly go into their browsers,” Brodman said. “The browser will still be important for the next step in long-tail content.”

However, Christa Quarles, Internet services analyst with Thomas Weisel Partners Associates, said the days of the stand-alone app are numbered. App stores have done an admirable job of bringing awareness to the capabilities of the smartphone and the versatility of the mobile Internet, but they’re essentially new takes on the walled garden. Eventually, subscribers will demand more and start migrating to their browsers to find services and apps in the vast expanse of the open Internet, she said.

“The app environment is perfect for right now,” Quarles said. “Those apps are a mini-Internet that will hopefully explode into the broader Internet.”

Speakers at the event also tried to tackle the issue of fragmentation — the pooling of the mobile Internet into fiefdoms with little interoperability between platforms. Jan Uddenfeldt, senior vice president and technology advisor to the CEO of Ericsson (NASDAQ:ERIC), promoted his conception of “horizontality,” a means of bridging the differences between different platforms by providing a common control plane architecture in the operator’s network that bridges the differences not only between different versions of the same application, but different applications of the genre. The industry is already opening, Uddenfeldt said, but that opening is confined to the boundaries of specific devices or platforms. In order to make truly scale mobile data applications across billions of connections, the industry has to embrace interoperability as well as openness, he said.

At the very least, the industry must move beyond the concept of linking a single platform to a single point of content and application distribution, said Dadi Perlmutter, executive vice president and general manager of Intel’s (NADAQ:INTC) architecture group. Restricting access to a single phone or platform app store or carrier portal limits discoverability for developers and options for consumers and can produce the unwanted side effect of stifling the market no matter how innovative and open the particular platform might be, he said.

“You don’t buy a car that takes you only to Macy’s, not Woolworth’s,” Perlmutter said.