Dean Bubley: Just give me a wireless pipe....

I enjoy reading Dean Bubley's new blog, Disruptive Wireless, because he tells it like he sees it. He seems to be a straight shooter with little to no waffling. Today he posts that he beleives "the IP/Internet issue is going to hit the mobile operators even harder than the fixed guys, and that the cellular industry is even more ostrich-like in its state of denial at present."

I especially like the concluding paragraphs, where Bubley states:

the mobile operators are different. They are addicted to the consumer market, to glossy marketing, and the idea that absolutely everything is a "service" and therefore billable. Although some grudgingly wholesale capacity through MVNOs, they're still incredibly sensitive about being seen as pipes, especially "dumb" ones. Most don't have a sophisticated enterprise group that is educating the rest of the organisation that pipes can be "smart", albeit at the cost of being dull. Instead of trying to offer robust mobile IP-VPNs so users can deploy their own VoIP solution, they're still trying to pretend that "mobile PBX" solutions can succeed. Many also seem convinced they can offer billed IM services that don't interoperate well with MSN and Yahoo.

Many seem uncertain about deploying IMS, worrying that it could open the floodgates to 3rd-party IP applications. What they don't realise is that it's going to happen anyway, and that opening the floodgates is the only way to avoid drowning in the flood.