RSS feedsOne of my pet hates is paying for stuff I don’t think I should have to pay for and several things fit into this rather broad bracket, water being one of them. Why, in a country where water is literally everywhere, should I be expected to pay the best part of two pounds for a bottle of water? And don’t even get me started on water metering.
Like air, water should be one of society’s givens. Without it we would die,
so we shouldn’t be expected to have to pay for it. We don’t have to pay for air
so why should we be expected to pay for water?
Well actually, it turns out that we do have to pay for air. At least, that’s
what some of the UK’s mobile phone operators believe, which are now looking to
wireless hotspots based on WiFi as an extra revenue stream.
I was staggered when I learned that the much publicised deal that Starbucks had struck with T-Mobile to offer WiFi access in its coffee shops would be a charged service. After all, the 2.4GHz spectrum that WiFi runs over is a licence-free band of the airwaves.
Service providers had no initial outlay to make with WiFi offerings. The fact that mobile phone operators made some of the most monumental errors in business judgement by agreeing to pay £22.5bn between them for the right to offer 3G services does not mean that every other wireless access service should cost the consumer an arm and a leg as well.
Wireless internet access via WiFi should be a value-add service that Starbucks and its like offers to tempt customers into its coffee shops. It would cost Starbucks next to nothing to offer it and the fact that it threatens 3G revenue is, to them at least, irrelevant.
So I was pleased to read that Google is entering into a joint venture with US-based internet service provider, Earthlink, to kit out the entire city of San Francisco with free wireless internet access. It is, of course, early days, but the vision is that they will cover a 46.7 square-mile area of the city with wireless broadband. People will then have the choice of either using a free Google service to log on wirelessly (at near broadband speeds, but which requires the use of a Google account), or to pay $20 a month for access through Earthlink at greater speeds of about 1Mbits/sec.
Of course, nothing in life comes free (another thing I find deeply annoying), it’s more about who bears the cost. To make the free service pay, advertisers will stump up for the right to have their logos beamed to consumers, which Google will be able to pinpoint to within a couple of hundred metres. This brings its own privacy concerns, but at least a service that should be free will be free.
In my opinion, access alone isn’t enough to charge consumers. Service providers should look to content providers for their revenues, a kind of virtual ground rent, if you wish. An analogy would be that you wouldn’t expect to pay to get into your local shopping centre – the shops themselves pay for the right to be there. This model can, and should, be mirrored on the internet.
Thankfully, I don’t think this is a long way off – and some recent activity on this side of the pond backs me up. First, the City of London is the latest urban area to enter into an agreement with a service provider, this time The Cloud, to cover the entire Square Mile with wireless internet access. While this will not be free, how long service providers can realistically expect to charge consumers a premium to access the internet is highly questionable.
Second, unless you’ve been living in a cave for the past couple of weeks you will have heard that Carphone Warehouse is to offer free broadband. Well, almost. For £20.99 customers get unlimited local and national calls as well as unlimited calls to 28 countries worldwide and on top of this, a broadband connection. To put this into perspective, some service providers currently charge £20 for broadband access alone.
And finally, last year, BT committed £10bn to invest in what it calls its 21st Century Network (21CN) – a service that will initially be rolled out in Cardiff in the latter half of this year and then across the entire country by the end of the decade. 21CN is a new generation backbone network that will allow far more feature-rich content to be provided over the internet.
One should be careful not to underestimate the impact these changes will have on the UK’s e-economy. It is fair to say that if finance directors and chief executives are not currently investing heavily in their online strategies, or investigating how this second internet boom could impact on their business, then they had better have an extremely good reason why not.
Because, while having to pay for air is a severe irritation, the thought of being unprepared for the revolution in internet behaviour we are likely to see in the next five years or so could prove fatal.
