the onda

Carriers today are all aflutter about the prospect of non-mobile phone devices. For instance, as a large OEM, you are likely to get a meeting with the top brass at any of the world's largest carriers so long as you are touting a netbook device or an ereader. At the same time, the smartphones are being starved for 3G data connectivity throughout the world. What gives?

Well the reality is that the all-you-can-eat, general purpose device is more than most carriers can handle. The iPhone has definitely proved that in the United States with AT&T. Give people a decent general purpose browser and a few specialized applications (namely around media streaming) and they will go nuts, or at least more nuts than current T1 backhaul and cell radio stations can accommodate.

The ereaders are easy to understand: with the e-ink displays gating any meaningful use of the network, and the tollbooth that is the bookstore on the backend, carriers see Kindle clones as easy money (at least until the Apple tablet ships). But the bigger question is: why netbooks?

One theory is that people will expect to use netbooks mostly where they already use laptops, around wi-fi halos that will give them 3-10x the speed they can expect to get from a 3G network. And as such, the ability to charge $60-80 USD/month is just free gravy to the carrier.

But I think it goes beyond that. I think that most carriers love the idea of getting consumers hooked on the idea of ubiquitous access to the network— so much so that they are willing to "forward price" access to the the 3G bits (forward pricing implies taking a loss now that will be made up later when the cost of manufacturing supply catches up with stimulated demand and has been common in semiconductor driven industries for a long time). You may not spend a lot of time listening to Pandora on your 3G netbook, but the sheer fact that you can is likely to get you hooked to the ubiquitous service. For those rare moments when you might want to.

Unwittingly this business decision to collect marginal revenue with little marginal cost is training a marketplace of ubiquitously connected consumers who will begin to measure devices not on megahertz and gigabytes, but on how "connected" they are. And my suspicion is that once the mainstream flips into this mode of thinking, no one will dare ship a device without the ubiqconn feature box checked. Good times.