A less ambitious wireless

As this year's CTIA Wireless begins, I can't help thinking how much the mobile industry has changed in the seven years since I started covering it. I know you expect me to wax positive about all the milestones of this new cellular world, but that's not what I'm getting at. Yes, the mobile phone has changed our lives in irrevocable ways — and not just the developed world. The third world, the urban poor and the rural forgotten have all been touched. But we always knew that was going to happen.

The change I'm talking about is in the ambition of scope rather than ambition of scale. From the day I wrote my first wireless story, it was a given that cellular services would spread like wildfire. But it was also a given that wireless would bring with it a raft of applications that would functionally change how we interacted with the world. For every wireline service and application, there would be a new and better wireless version. And then there were the applications only available to the new mobile elite. We weren't just changing where we communicated; we were changing people's fundamental lifestyles.

That never happened.

People are still doing over wireless what they did at the home and in the office. They're just doing it on the move. Wireless e-mail didn't take off until Research in Motion figured out how to directly link its BlackBerry into the wired Exchange Server. Mobile video services have made a paltry showing at best, and the excitement about mobile TV these days is centered around replicating the cable set-top box on the handset. Music has definitely been a success, but people aren't subscribing en masse to the new wireless streaming services. They're downloading songs over the network, just like they do with their PCs and iPods.

Wireless never created a new lifestyle — it became an extension of our current lifestyle, and gradually the industry has come to understand this. When the first analog phones came out 20 years ago, their value wasn't in the new network that was created. Their value came from the fact that they extended a near-and-dear service, voice telephony, into the open air. Just think what would have become of the mobile industry if an analog cell phone could only call another analog cell phone.

Wireless has become so pervasive that there could be room for wireless-only applications. Short message service is a perfect example. But those applications are few, and the industry is rapidly giving up its hunt to isolate and pounce on them. The true value of the wireless network doesn't lie in linking mobile services to the Internet or wired world. The only value wireless offers is mobility. That may sound pessimistic, but look at how much you use your cell phone today. Mobility is the most powerful technology of all.