The Sociology of Mobility

The U.S. mobile services sector has reached a critical point in its maturation. After more than two decades of impressive technological advancement and subscriber growth, wireless has reached a stage of necessary customization.

It is no longer possible for all mobile service packages to appeal to all walks of life. Wireless is evolving, just as the wireline sector evolved from the aptly named “plain old telephone service” to a much wider range of service options and features specifically designed to appeal to various demographic groups.

Nowhere is this more evident than in the burgeoning area of mobile entertainment. In this month’s cover story, Jason Ankeny takes an in-depth look at Def Jam’s efforts to mobilize its array of content and extend its branding efforts from music and fashion into the mobile scene. In interviews with Def Jam founder Russell Simmons, Def Jam Enterprise CEO Kevin Liles and their collaborators, Ankeny explores Def Jam’s ambitions to define mobility for the hip-hop generation.

Those best-equipped to understand, embrace and exploit mobility’s new reality will prosper in a new era of tailor-made wireless by brokering content deals, branding services and marketing to the appropriate groups of customers. That group will include the media and entertainment companies that facilitate content development and mobilize their own content (like Def Jam) as well as those that become strictly the consumer faces of wireless services (the countless mobile virtual network operator hopefuls striving to emulate the Virgin Mobile model by associating their own, already popular brands with mobile service).

Others will provide the underlying network resources that support those effortsÑthe wireless version of the wireline side’s dumb pipes. But it would be shortsighted to call companies that fit that classification “dumb.”

On the contrary, the carriers that recognized the trend toward MVNOs early onÑthose that are reselling excess capacity on their systems to companies that want to sell their own brands of mobile servicesÑare quite smart. So are the outfits providing the required network intelligence and software support for MVNOs, such as the two companies profiled in Dan O’Shea’s article on mobile virtual network enabler efforts, which begins on page 22.

There are myriad other parts to the mobile entertainment equationÑeverything from content delivery platforms that are so critical to effective distribution and revenue collection for mobile content to highly varied next-generation network technologies, without which there would be no mobile entertainment sector to speak of. It’s all part of an increasingly complex, demographically specific wireless services sector that ultimately will bear little resemblance to the homogenous mobile approaches of the past.