A problem with WiFi-based offload?

In general, I'm a fan of using WiFi to reduce load on 3G macro networks, especially for laptops used with 3G USB dongles and smartphones like the iPhone. Where the connection manager works well, there are various models which can permit the device to connect to home/office or public WiFi.

In particular, I'm seeing a fair amount of mobile operators use their own, or partners' networks of public WiFi APs. Most notably, AT&T acquired Wayport and has other footprint for use in iPhone offload, while Vodafone has cut a deal with BT OpenZone in the UK.

However, there is one problem as the density of such offload points increases. As well as the main public OpenZone points in London, I can also use the BT Fon "virtual hotspots" as an extension of my home broadband account.

While this is great for my laptop, it's causing me difficulties on my smartphone. The density of BT / Fon / OpenZone access points in central London is so high (in homes and offices or other locations) that as I walk down the street, my iPhone keeps attempting to register. But by the time I've got online, I've walked past it and onto the next one along the street with stronger signal.

If I walk 5 minutes from home to my local tube station, I need to switch off WiFi temporarily, if I actually want to use mobile data - otherwise I have a constant stream of pop-ups from the connection manager on-screen, and no reliable connection.

It probably wouldn't help with a high density of femtocells either, until there's a reliable way of doing femto-to-femto handoff as you walk down the street.

Food for thought.

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An open letter to Vodafone on data roaming pricing

Dear Marketing and Pricing Executives at Vodafone,

In the past, I've been pretty complimentary about you guys, especially with regard to things like Passport and innovations around third-party paid mobile broadband.

My attitude has just changed polarity.

In February, I switched my main personal mobile account to an iPhone on Vodafone UK. My main criterion for choosing Voda over iPhones supplied by O2, Orange or Tesco was specifically about international roaming charges. All the other pricing was much the same, and I thought that perhaps Vodafone's network might be less congested than O2's, without a million other iPhone users sharing it.

So I went to my local Carphone Warehouse, asked about the different international fees, checked online - and picked the Reds on the basis of a simple and intelligent charging structure, which seemed to be much less of a rip-off than the others.

We all know that most international data roaming is ludicrously-priced, and that it needed heavy regulation from Brussels to get European tariffs into the vague realm of sanity, with notification-of-charge and so forth. The whole industry privately agrees that data roaming pricing is a joke, even if few people at operators want to be seen killing the golden goose by acknowledging it in public.

But I thought that the costs on Vodafone - basically a flat fee of £5 per day for up to 25MB - were not too unreasonable. It's about half the price of a day of hotel WiFi, or perhaps 2 hours in an Internet cafe. Or 10x the price of Vodafone's UK prepaid daily tariff, which gives 25MB for 50p.

Expensive but acceptable, especially as I'm checking my business email. 25MB is ample for non-heavy use of an iPhone: email, catching up on blogs, a quick bit of Google maps and Facebook. Most importantly, I can be pretty confident that I can just use my phone normally, without double-checking the amount of data usage on the settings menu once an hour.

I know that the current EU-mandated wholesale price cap in Europe is €1 per MB, falling to €0.80 from July. I also know that Vodafone has its own footprint across Europe, so it's not as though it's getting stung for lots of wholesale data fees, as generally you're on-net anyway - so any disparities wash out on inter-country transfer pricing.

So, given that the only reason I'd chosen Vodafone in the first place was because of this tariff - and I'd recommended it to other people as well - I wasn't best-pleased to receive an SMS announcing:

"On June 15 data roaming prices are changing plus some countries will be moved into a different travel zone"

The new prices are £1 per MB, up to £5, then £5 for every 5MB after.

In other words, for 10MB the price has doubled, and for 25MB it has quintupled. For 25MB, that's 50x the cost of the domestic daily price. Apparently you get SMS alerts when close to 5MB and 10MB thresholds.

I see that the press release somehow manages to pitch the change as being positive for customers. I'm impressed that you seem to have managed to hire Alastair Campbell and Peter Mandelson so soon after the general election, to spin bad news for you.

I guess I'm back to using WiFi only on the iPhone when I'm travelling, and I'll go back to taking an unlocked Nokia and buying local data SIMs again.

I've double-checked this with customer service (your IVR system is broken, by the way) and asked to get transferred to someone whose job it is to deal with what I described as "high nuisance value" customers like me. Double-checked with her too, that this applies across the board, including iPhone tariffs.

So. My main (only!) reason for choosing Vodafone against its competitors has just been removed at a month's notice. Three months into an 18-month contract, so I can't just churn immediately as I'd like.

Honestly guys - I've heard Vodafone talk at various events and conference about customer loyalty, stickiness and so forth. Have you not worked out that if you show *contempt* for your own customers, that might work against you? You even got a plaudit the other day for smartphone customer loyalty - and up until 3pm this afternoon I would have given the survey a thumbs-up as well. Let's see what the next one looks like, eh?

[Edit: Note to all mobile operators: as long as you pull stunts like this, do you *really* think you can convince your customers to sign up for mobile payments/wallet service, or managed identity & authentication, or similar? How do I know you're not going to change the rules mid-contract to permit spam or charge extra? This whole idea of massive price changes to live contracts illustrates a huge amount of bad faith and a lack of business professionalism]

It's not as though you're increasing per-GB price for mass mobile broadband downloads either, where perhaps there's an argument that costs and prices are out of kilter. This is a per-MB roaming price - quite probably the single most overpriced, unjustifiable and most-hated item on operators' tariffs in the entire industry.

Now it's vaguely possible that this cost somehow reflects increased signalling through VLRs and RNCs, rather than actual data downloads, because of regular international data connection setups from smartphones. But if that's the case, you should say so - and frankly I can't believe anyone uses $20 worth of VLR resources per day. It would be cheaper for you to give users a local Vodafone SIM to switch to.

Overall, it's fair to say I'm furious about this. Oh, and I wasn't going to mention this before today - but your network in central London sucks too - the number of times I've been with friends with O2 iPhones who have coverage when I don't is amazing. As are the number of dropped data connections, mysterious "403" errors that need me to switch off & re-register and any number of other glitches.

I've written before about "Resentment Base Pricing" and "Active Customer Disloyalty". Looks like I've got a good case study.

So Vodafone people: any excuses? Is it genuine customer contempt, or just accidental?

Responses welcome either on this blog or via email.

Dean

(Note 1: journalists - feel free to quote me)
(Note 2: Google, you should probably work out a way to get the Maps app to send a GPS look-up via SMS when the user has data roaming switched off, returning with the nearest free WiFi cafe and a voucher for a discount espresso)

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From "dumb pipe" to "happy pipe"

Recently, I've been wondering exactly who coined the term "Dumb Pipe".

David Isenberg wrote a piece called "The Rise of the Stupid Network", in 1997, when he worked at AT&T. A copy is still available here, but although it uses the phrases "dumb bits" and "dumb transport", it doesn't mention the word "pipe".

The negative associations with this snappy, convenient epithet have probably cost the telecoms industry a trillion dollars. It is so unappealing, it seems to induce an almost visceral and irrational fear. You only have to look at the way that some vendors sneer "You don't want to end up a dumb pipe, do you?" to recognise that we're beyond cool-headed analysis and getting close to some legal form of discriminatory "-ism" here.

For the last couple of years, the term "smart pipe" has bubbled around, making a few people think a bit more closely about areas like policy, QoS and so forth. Yet it still does not appear to have dented the shield of fear or bias around the "dumb pipe" dystopia that many perceive to be encroaching. The frenzied and ridiculous appeals to the European Commission for a "Google Tax" are prime examples of this. In essence, the lawsuits appear to say:


"We are dumb.... so can you please tax the clever people for us?"

Recently, I've been using the term "Happy Pipe" instead, to point out some possible different futures - and also to confront the almost bigoted preconceptions that surround networks' supposed "dumbness". This applies to both fixed and mobile broadband - although the challenges, technologies and capacity are different, as are the business models emerging to monetise the happiness.

There are a few separate strands here:

• Today's networks are pretty far from dumb, and there is huge value in deploying and running them well
  
• The smartest networks are the ones which work collaboratively *with* Internet and content companies, not antagonistically against them. This specifically related to areas like policy management.
• There is much under-exploited potential for revenue around wholesale models. There are many potential business opportunities, both for "bulk" wholesale and "slice and dice" methods of deriving extra fees for capacity and value-added services.

It is conspicuous that it has required a range of new players in mobile data, such as Jasper Wireless, to develop extra functionality that translates between a carrier's wholesale offerings, and those consumer electronics and M2M firms that which to exploit connectivity in their new products. While some operators have innovated in their platforms (eg Telenor, speaking last week at Telco 2.0 about M2M), others have become introspective.

It is difficult for a camera manufacturer to think "I'd love to sell a new SLR with 1000 photo uploads included" and then find someone who could structure that deal, because it's not a "subscription". It's difficult for a hotel chain to shop around for a way to part-subsidise roaming charges for its international guests. It is difficult for an Internet video provider to get a "network congestion API" so it can cleverly rate-adapt its codecs during peak hours, or even just push a message to its users warning them of likely buffering delays.

There are so many ways that the capabilities of a broadband network - fixed or mobile - could be used to improve customer experience, work more effectively with upstream partners, improve traffic management without interfering with users' expectations and unlock new revenue streams.

I covered a large amount of analysis on these and other sub-themes in my recent report on Fixed and Mobile Broadband Business Models, published by Telco 2.0 (details are here or email information AT disruptive-analysis DOT com).

In it, the report concludes that operators have 4 main strategic choices:

- Becoming a full, Telco 2.0-style service provider with a broad set of retail, wholesale and "two-sided" propositions, engaging with users, developers, content providers and so forth
- Becoming a "happy pipe" provider, focusing more on wholesale propositions in addition to class-leading access and related infrastructure based value-added services
- Becoming a "government department" - ie running national broadband networks or critical infrastructure like electricity smart grids.
- Becoming a "device specialist" focused on creating user experiences and product/service end-to-end propositions in either fixed or mobile domains - exploiting Moore's Law, rather than betting against it.

These are not mutually exclusive, and certainly I would expect the very largest operators to have a foot in all camps, especially where they have multiple national properties, or dedicated wholesale divisions. Fixed operators with "structural separation" provide an interesting model for their peers in mobile.

One other missing piece of the puzzle is exactly what type of services can/should be offered on top of access - and how they should be charged. The simplistic attitude that YouTube / Skype / Facebook / Salesforce.com somehow act as predatory "over the top" providers, somehow disenfranchising operators from their rightful revenue streams is weak thinking.

There is no reason why Verizon or Orange or China Mobile could not have acquired YouTube instead of Google - except the telcos' historical inertia behind maintaining the link between access and service businesses. Despite the past 10 years, there is *still* a reluctance by network owners to offer services beyond the confines of their own access customer base - thus denying themselves the global scale required to compete with Internet-based providers. Yes, those services may well be *enhanced* over their own infrastructure, but that is not a reason to eschew pushing the widest possible distribution as well.

The bottom line is that we need to move away from this "dumb pipe" slogan. Separating connectivity and service is inevitable in a lot of ways - but that can actually add value to providers of both.

(In addition to the research report on business models , Disruptive Analysis also undertakes strategic consultancy for vendors and service providers in this area. This encompasses diverse aspects including management workshops, business plan review, competitive analysis, organisational development and executive coaching, and studies of market dynamics and forecasting).

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Mobile broadband traffic - be careful about language

I am currently writing a Disruptive Analysis research report on mobile broadband traffic management strategies. I have discussed various concepts on this for the past year or so - the relative merits of offload, compression, policy management and so forth.

One important factor for vendors and operators to keep reminding themselves is about the importance of accurate language, logic and semantics. The wrong words can drive poor decision-making, especially on "emotive" issues. Non-sequiturs and logical fallacies can lead discussions or engagements astray.

One of the most mis-used words is "capacity".

What triggered this post was seeing a sentence along the lines of "3% of mobile data users take up 40% of capacity".

This is almost certainly untrue - as very few networks (none?) actually run at capacity-utilisation rate of above 40% - especially when averaged across all cells. If that were true, there would be almost-permanant and geographically-ubiquitous congestion for mobile data.

Add in to this the fact that "capacity" is actually an ill-defined term embracing multiple separate variables (uplink capacity, downlink capacity, signalling capacity etc) and measurable at various points in the network, and it becomes even more useless as a description of the current state of affairs.

What I expect may be the more accurate statement is "3% of mobile data users account for 40% of aggregate downstream traffic".

Which is an interesting observation - but not in itself a "problem statement", and certainly not something that can immediately lead to conclusions such as "... therefore flat-rate pricing is untenable" or "... therefore it is critical to manage specific applications".

Those are examples of non-sequiturs which are potentially damaging. There is no direct logical connection.

Instead, it is critical first to understand what the problem actually is. So, 3% of mobile data users account for 40% of aggregate downstream traffic - but what impact does that have, either on the other 97% of users, or the operator's cost base?

If that 40% of traffic was confined to rural cells operating at much higher rates in the middle of the night, it is likely that the impact on other users would be zero, although it might have some variable costs associated with peering. If that 40% was instead concentrated in the busiest urban cells in the middle of the day, when existing capacity really is creaking, then there's a much more pressing problem.

But what if heavy users tend to download a lot at night... but then have usage during daytime that is broadly on a par with everyone else? They are then not using capacity in a way that causes any more congestion than light users. It could even be that a nominally light user, doing a sudden big burst of mobile video at 9.30am on the bus to work, causes more problems than another user trickling P2P traffic throughout 24 hours.

And in each of these cases, there are varying signalling loads as well. A smartphone user checking his email 10 times an hour might be causing more headaches than a laptop user watching 15 mins of video once a day.

My view is that until there is really good, really granular data on actual usage patterns (and scenarios and forecasts for how that might change in future), knee-jerk comments about "bandwidth hogs" are likely to cause more trouble than they solve.

Instead, I am working on a priority list of actions that operators can take to reduce the pressures on the network without creating unintended consequences in terms of user experience, customer satisfaction, or fixing "the wrong problem".

There are various actions - and technological avenues - that can be pursued without risking money on over-complex solutions. I am particularly skeptical of policy management approaches that stress focus on application differentiation, rather than (for example) time-of-day.

Watch this space for more extracts from the analysis.

(As well as the research study, I am also sharing my views and data on this in private advisory consultations. Please contact me for further details - information AT disruptive-analysis DOT com)

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Paying for mobile QoS? Three thought experiments

A regular refrain from vendors I speak with is that content companies, or application providers, could be persuaded to pay for extra mobile broadband "quality". The argument goes that a video website or cloud computing provider would pay for guarantees of absolute or relative prioritisation, bandwidth levels, latency, jitter etc.

Irrespective of the legal situation - which in any case varies by country and over time, I have my doubts about the technical and commercial practicality.

I think it is much more achievable in the fixed world, where the operator doesn't have to contend with the vagaries of radio, and where the presence of a "box" like a gateway gives a much better chance of monitoring what is actually delivered. The WiFi or ethernet connection at the fixed-broadband end-point to a final end-device (PC, TV, phone, tablet etc) also gives a clear demarcation point of responsibility. The operator can say with confidence that their bit of the end-to-end system did its job - and any issues with battery life, memory, device configuration and so forth are your problems. That's much more difficult with a smartphone - if the extra-quality video doesn't work, whose fault is it? And does the video provider still pay?

Nevertheless, whenever I spell out my concerns about differential charging for applications, I get bombarded by vendors (and some operators) insisting that their DPI box can detect absolutely everything, right down to what the user had for breakfast that morning.

Rather than get to an impasse, I thought that as well as commercial, legal and technical reasons, I'd also have a try at logical flaws in the argument - and perhaps highlight some extra opportunities along the way.

First off is prioritisation of the operators' in-house services. Many mobile carriers have their own video streaming, music or other rich application/content platforms. I'm assuming that some measure of optimisation is typically used by the operators to ensure these perform well - obviously it will be easier to test inhouse, and senior management can ensure adequate cooperation between network and application teams.

But.... if "real" quality can only be achieved at the level of manageable network QoS... and if "serious" content providers are willing to pay for it,.... then why not set up an effective structural separation between the services group and the network delivery team? If it actually came out of their own budget and P&L, would the inhouse video content team really pay money to the other department for improved network access? Or would they instead use rate-adaption and other tools to work around the limitations of best-efforts?

I haven't heard of any operators running an internal QoS market, but I'd be fascinated if any readers have anecdotes.

The next thought experiment takes this concept a bit further.

Now, consider the situation once again, where the operator's video content team is willing to pay extra for QoS to ensure their streaming is delivered better than it would be from the open Internet.

And consider that another operator offers network-based QoS - perhaps in the same country, or perhaps elsewhere in the world. Given there's already an "open market" in video streaming via YouTube, Hulu and so on.... shouldn't that operator in-house team therefore be prepared to deliver its content via other carriers' networks? Let's say, for the sake of argument, Verizon providing its video service to users on Telefonica O2 in the UK.

Given that they are in-house teams within operators, surely *they* understand better than anyone the capabilities - and potential differentiation - that comes from network-based prioritisation and QoS? If Verizon paid guaranteed-QoS fees to O2, shouldn't it be able to create and market a class-leading video service that end users would pay for? And shouldn't the O2 network team also think that Verizon's video people are therefore much easier to sell QoS to than, say, YouTube?

In other words.... if operators (and their vendors) really believe that "premium" network QoS can enhance the competitiveness of applications and content, or raise ARPU and improve customer satisfaction... why don't they put their money where their mouths are? If Telco X is clever enough and network-savvy enough to create a QoS- managed service that should outperform YouTube.... why hasn't it happened?

My last point is not about prioritisation, but coverage. Often, the gating factor on overall Quality of Experience is not radio or transport or core resource, it's a simple lack of decent signal. (Yes, I know that in theory coverage is a bit dependent on other users in the same cell, but let's just assume the culprit here is a thick stone wall).

Certainly, Vodafone is marketing a femtocell in the UK under the name of "Sure Signal" - and getting users to pay a premium for an "enhanced quality network" in their home or workplace. While some of the customers are just buying the femto to get any reliable signal at all, there is some anecdotal evidence that a proportion want "better than normal" coverage "5 bars, all the time!" - for example if they live inside, but near the edge of a cell. This tends to support the argument that a certain (smallish) group of users might pay extra for "gold service" QoS, however that is defined.

So then the question is... for an operator wanting to offer an improved *average* experience, both in terms of absolute coverage, and higher performance throughout each cell - is the best and cheapest mechanism really through network prioritisation? Or might it be more effective to do some sort of national-roaming deal with competitors, where the phone switches to a rival's network at a given location and time, if that network has a better signal and uncongested capacity?

Wouldn't it make sense for the mobile industry to have the equivalent of the airlines' interlining and codesharing agreements? In those situations, you can get an end-to-end ticket issued on Airline A, which covers one leg actually operated by Airline B. Your luggage gets "handed off" seamlessly and Airline A takes overall responsibility for end-to-end quality. Airline A benefits from Airline B's better coverage or schedule at a local level, while Airline B gets incremental revenue and traffic from Airline A's better sales and distribution to end users. Interestingly, low-cost carriers like EasyJet and Ryanair generally don't participate in these type of arrangements, only the premium-priced airlines do.

The analogy is simple.

If a customer with the "nameplate" Vodafone service sometimes actually gets connectivity via the Orange or T-Mobile network, would they really care, as long as their average performance went up? And, in fact, might they not even pay a premium for it? Could there ever become a distinction between a "full service network" (which puts you on one of its nominal rivals' cells when it gives you better coverage, but charges you more to cover the wholesale fees), versus the low-cost network which is all-or-nothing, running just its own, silo'd coverage?

Is the answer to better QoS (which customers are prepared to pay for) not another box in the network, but just better/richer wholesale arrangements and national roaming? Can we go further than current development in network-sharing, and have a more generalised platform for deals?

[Note: I know that it's not that simple, either because of regulation or because it takes a finite time to find, register and roam onto another network. But they could be improved by a telecom effort to find a convenient codeshare/interline approach]

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Does the outcome of the Dutch 2.6GHz auction represent skepticism on LTE?

There are various spectrum auctions ongoing at present or the near future. The big ones are the 3G bands in India (2100 and 2600MHz), as well as a multi-band auction (800 / 1800 / 2000 /2600 MHz) in Germany.

But there is a smaller one that has just finished in the Netherlands, for the 2.6GHz band only. The outcome has been pretty lacklustre - just €2.6m. Martin Sauter has the breakdown of it here.

Trying to analyse this is a bit further, my current thoughts are:

- The two newcomers both have extensive fixed broadband assets - Tele2 has 431k subscriptions and the other (Ziggo) is a joint venture between cable operators. That potentially points to an "inside-out" strategy at 2.6GHz, plus Tele2 attempting to switch some traffic (data?) away from its MVNO arrangement.
- There are only three incumbents, which means that competition for spectrum in other bands is not as harsh as in other markets. Nevertheless, it seems odd that they only bid for 2x5 and 2x10MHz - although it's not immediately clear how those fit with the spectrum caps under the auction rules. The 5MHz is particularly strange, as it potentially means lower peak and shared rates for devices running in a "hotspot" 2.6GHz band location, rather than a wider macrocell.
- We can pretty much write off any opportunity for mobile WiMAX or TD-LTE in the Netherlands for the forseeable future, given the lack of bids for unpaired TDD spectrum.

One interesting possibility is that the Netherlands' very high fixed broadband penetration might mean that operators are looking to WiFi and femtocells rather than spectrum additions for capacity enhancement. The Dutch are already among the leaders in the deployment of picocells as well - both for public locations and for low-power GSM.

Another questionmark is around LTE. The results of the auction suggest that 2.6GHz (the main likely band for LTE in Europe) is not seen as particularly strategic - which may reflect reticence overally for the technology in Holland. I've suggested before that operators should lean on their vendors (and chipset suppliers) for support of 2.6GHz HSPA, which would seem to fit better with the allocations.

I'll try and catch up with the German, Danish and Indian auctions over the next week or so.



(There is also an ongoing 2.1 / 2.6GHz auction in Denmark)

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Why I think the iPad won't change anything

At last week's Telco 2.0 summit in London, I crossed swords with financial analyst Richard Kramer of Arete Research.

He has a view that the PC industry (and specifically laptops) has failed to innovate for much of the last 10-20 years, and will be overturned by newcomers, particularly Apple's iPad and more generally a new wave of tablet-style competitors. He was less definitive about the role of telcos in supporting these devices, but definitely felt that they represented a step change in how people engage with the web and various forms of content. He singled out the newspaper and magazine industry as being a prime candidate for iPad-isation in similar fashion to the iPod and music.

I disagree strongly. I believe that the iPad is a side-show, albeit a glamorous one. I also have extremely grave doubts about the massmarket viability of next-generation tablets (or MIDs, or smartbooks or mobile computers etc) based on Android, Meego or Chome OS. I'm even less sanguine about the possibility that there could be a telecom operator model underpinning those ecosystems.

My belief is that the PC industry is guilty not so much of a lack of innovation, but a lack of cohesive marketing strategy. There is no "Windows PC Community" estimating the incremental GDP arising in the developing world from PC-based Internet access and software industries. There is no glossy marketing pointing out that sharks haven't bothered evolving for 300 million years, because they are essentially perfect for their niche.

Instead, the PC industry has gleefully taken the GSMA's shilling, hoping for a few extra crumbs of operator subsidy and extra retail outlets during the recession. At the time when banks and credit card companies were taking a dim view of incremental consumer purchases, mobile operators cleverly managed to disguise loans under the guise of "free" laptops. They have been complicit in pretending that "embedded 3G" was going to be pervasive, despite knowing full-well that most netbooks are sold through ordinary channels to people wanting a cheap PC for use on WiFi at home or in school, or clogging up the 3G networks with commodity traffic supplied via commodity dongles.

Let me switch to the iPad, and by extension other tabletty-type computers that might come next.

Yes, it's pretty. Yes, it's sold to quite a lot of the usual star-struck Apple-istas already. Yes, I'm sure there are plenty of uses for it. But there are plenty of uses for many cool gadgets which make them appealing to gadget-lovers. And I guarantee that every single one of them will own (a) a mobile phone and (b) a computer (PC or Mac) already, and wouldn't give them up if you paid them.

You'll notice that the iPad has been cleverly positioned by Apple so as to avoid any risk of competition with its Mac range. Jobs clearly believes that people will want a fully-open computer as well as at least one locked-down device. How many Macs would he sell, if he prohibited them from running Flash? Or only allowed apps or content that had been vetted by his censorship team? Or restricted the use of external media like SD cards?

Now, I certainly can't blame Apple for trying to create a potential new pool of profit from a cool gadget betwixt Computer and Smartphone. If it takes surplus cash away from people who'd otherwise be buying electric can-openers or new TVs, then fair enough.

But to claim (as some people do) that it either:

- a) renders netbooks and laptops obsolete, or
- b) heralds a mass switch-over from print media

sounds ridiculous to me.

Yes, netbooks are *mostly* used for web-based applications [such as my writing this post on my Samsung], but I definitely want a full suite of native applications as well, which I choose and install myself, not subject to the vagaries of Apple's appstore. I cannot imagine myself with an iPad writing this - with my email, streaming music, Skype and Yahoo Messenger running in the background, working on a number of office files as well.

Now that doesn't mean that I couldn't ever use an iPad myself as well - I already browse the web a fair amount on my iPhone, even though my netbook is just downstairs. So there is an argument that Internet usage will become more segmented by task type. If I want to move pictures from my camera to my hard drive, and selctively upload a few to Facebook, I'll use my desktop. If I'm on a plane, I'll use the netbook. If I'm in bed and want to check my email and overnight SMS's first thing in the morning, the phone.

So maybe it's a device for the 10-20% of Internet usage time when you don't have anything else to hand.

The print media thing is a bit different, and clearly is outside my main domain of industry coverage. And I understand that there's a whole world of pain in that industry at the moment. But I'm unconvinced the iPad is the answer for more than a tiny fraction of readers. I buy a fair number of magazines, a fair number of books, and I read a fair number of newspapers (some of them free and disposable, like London's Evening Standard). I'm expert at folding them to read on the Tube. I usually have reading material for flights. I've got a stack of old Wired magazines around home, and a few copies of Top Gear for anyone desperately in need of reading material in my bathroom. I have a bookcase full of Lonely Planets and Rough Guides - my traveller's equivalent of a trophy cabinet.

Yet I don't have a Kindle, nor have I seriously considered getting an e-reader. I've only ever seen three people with them in London, one of them a semi-famous TV celebrity who was in my local Starbucks, hoping people would first notice it and then recognise him.

I simply cannot see a situation where a large bulk of the world's readers of the FT or Cosmopolitan or Harry Potter go digital *in substitution* of their usual print media. It's not like music, for which the move from CD to MP3 reduced the fallibility and bulk of moving parts, and for which headphones insulate you from the vagaries of the environment. People read in places with no power, bright light, risk of theft, or where comfort and tactility are all part of the experience (armchair + book + whisky, or cafe + cappucino + newspaper in the sunshine). They may want to avoid carrying a bag - or baulk at the need to carry both tablet and PC together.

I can understand the appeal of interactiveness of a connected tablet for media owners and their advertisers. But I am just unconvinced that the user experience and intangible benefits of print has been given as much thought.

In summary, I can see a market for iPad-type devices of a similar scale to (say) personal navigation devices - maybe a worldwide target audience of perhaps 50m people. There are some fascinating niches - perhaps education, or gaming, or a few video applications. But I cannot see them replacing PCs (or Macs or netbooks), nor making a meaningful dent in the consumption of newspapers opr magazines. And outside a few metropolitan hotspots, I can't seem them heavily impacting operators' revenues or their networks either.

[Note: if you represent a company in the mobile industry that wants a contrarian view of device strategy and its impact on business models, please get in touchwith me via information AT disruptive-analysis DOT com]

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