the Onda

It's easy to hate wireless carriers but in the world of Internet-connected smart devices, their investment in ubiquitous data networks is enviable, despite whatever the tree-hugging wifi-for-everyone folks might want to believe. Because— as is always the case in the consumer space— it comes back to user experience.

I wanted the wifi devices to win but mostly because I can't stand the notion of physical objects that we buy coming with a subscription. However, the Amazon Kindle (about which I will have loads more to say over the coming months) shows device manufacturers a potential path forward: lock down the user's ability to abuse the network and absorb the wholesale price the carrier must be charging in the price of the device. The Kindle benefits from an annuity business model of its own (as a user you have to keep buying books for it to remain useful) so Amazon is well positioned to take the risk of eating the subscription cost up front, but we are beginning to see other examples where device makers are willing to bundle the cost of the data subscription up front.

Take my favorite recent example as evidence that even a low bandwidth ubiquitous cell connection really makes all the difference. When the Chumby came out, I jumped at the chance to get one, mostly because it seemed like such a cool idea (open source hardware that was "Internet native" through its Wi-Fi radio). However, despite the promise of a blank screen that could be programmed with as many channels of content as I could imagine, there were product limitations that quickly reduced Wallace (you get to name your Chumby) to a screen about the local weather forecast sitting right above my bathroom mirror. Unfortunately, every couple of weeks, Wallace had a bad habit of falling off of the wireless network, partly because of the product's betaness (recent firmware upgrades have made this a little better), but indubitably also because my wireless network is just not that reliable.* And every time it did, I'd look up to see the weather only to be slapped by the Chumby equivalent of the BSOD, a message telling me that it had lost Internet connectivity.

When this happens to a laptop, it is a problem that gets fast attention due to the fact that there are often a bunch of other activities taking place that require a working Internet connection. Single purpose appliances don't have this luxury though— they need to just work and when they don't, they are no longer appliances but IT hassles.

Enter the Brookstone Weather Wizard, made by a local company called Ambient Devices which has become an expert in low bandwidth Internet-connected devices. It is uglier, less capable, and much less cool than the Chumby, but at half the price, it does a brilliant job of serving its single function well. And best of all, it comes out of the box "networked" (the only change I had to make was to tell it that I was not in Providence but in Cambridge). In fact as a user, I don't even have to care how it gets its data which makes it such an easy replacement for all of the meteorological gizmos that came before it.

Interestingly enough, Ambient used to sell their devices along with a subscription, a model which ensured that an Ambient Orb that had been given to me at a conference became instantly dispensable the moment I wanted to display data I had to pay a recurring fee for.

If I was looking into getting into the MVNO business (the companies who buy wireless network access at wholesale to brand it for specific audiences, a la the now defunct Amp'd), I'd look into setting one up that could take some of this subscription risk out of the equation for manufacturers of devices by selling a embeddable radio with a given level of bandwidth for lifetime connectivity at one fixed fee. The economics of an MVNO might make this impossible, so perhaps it would have to be one of the core wireless providers that takes this approach. But as the mainstream consumer moves towards the higher speed 2.5G/3G wireless networks with their mobile phones, there might be an opportunity to flat price all of the old GPRS capacity that is being freed up. And for most appliances, this might be plenty of bandwidth.

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