What’s the mobile data holdup?

It’s becoming increasingly difficult for wireless carriers to justify their long-standing argument that mobile data is not taking off because of a dearth of development on the applications side. At a time when innovative technology creation is sometimes difficult to locate in the telecom industry, you can still find plenty of inventive, commercially friendly wireless data apps coming out of applications development houses. A lot of those apps are even already licensed by wireless carriers for use on their networks.

So why aren’t more people using them? Carriers around the world spent billions upgrading their networks to next-generation status, which means they not only have the capacity to handle data transport but also need more than just voice revenue to accelerate ROI. If they’re selling, why is no one buying?

I recently concluded, based on a few personal experiences in wireless stores and some discussions with applications developers themselves, that it was a retail marketing problem. Most applications developers rely on the carriers to market their inventions, and most of them do that via mass-market advertising and retail channels. As one developer pointed out to me, the average employee in a wireless retail outlet makes money selling handsets and signing customers up for service plans but doesn’t make much additional commission from enhanced services, so there’s little incentive to push them. Perhaps if they had more incentive, coupled with more technical expertise about how the applications work and how they could enhance customers’ wireless experience, they would do a better job hawking them.

Recent discussions with a developer of billing software made me think my conclusion was only half right (if that). The other barrier to widespread adoption of wireless data, this company said, is billing. Carriers buy the applications software, put it on their networks and package the apps in their service offerings, but can’t figure out how to price them and often can’t modify their complex billing architectures to accommodate them. The end result, the billing vendor said, is either under-marketed services or “free trails” of applications, either of which results in no additional revenue for the carrier.

Wireless carriers: Your networks and the devices they support are more ready than ever to handle new mobile data applications. What are you doing to address the retail sales and billing issues?

E-mail me at: jmeyers@primediabusiness.com.