Comment: Corporates lose out to consumers

Many staff need access to email, scheduling information and back-end corporate databases while on the move, providing a significant market opportunity for mobile operators to supply appropriate communications services.

After all, corporate customers are usually happy to pay a premium for the mobile services they buy, if acceptable quality of service, performance and support are guaranteed. For operators, the revenues from corporate customers are invariably steady, usually pre-paid, and are rarely derived from short-term, single-user contracts.

Which makes it all the more galling that both mobile operators and handset makers are concentrating their attention on providing data services for consumers.

Like me, many mobile workers still struggle to send emails, faxes, presentations or any other form of data file via mobile phone. Often I have to stop whatever else I'm doing for 15 minutes or more to wait for transmission to complete, and to keep a close eye on my connection in case it is suddenly and unceremoniously severed, thereby requiring me to repeat the whole laborious and time-consuming process all over again.

Yet if I wanted to, I could take a colour picture of my stupid grinning face and transmit it to a friend or colleague who I would generally expect to be amused by its receipt. And in the spirit of reciprocation, he or she might then snap a picture of themselves, perhaps in front of a famous landmark or familiar location, neither of which I would recognise due to the poor quality of the image, and send it back.

This one communication session, transmitting two pictures, both of large file size, would use GPRS bandwidth already strained by the weight of user traffic, no matter how many new data compression techniques are developed and applied. Multiply that one picture messaging session by tens, possibly hundreds of thousands, and by my calculations there is even less chance of me transmitting those emails or other documents in less time than it takes me to grow a beard, or even getting a connection at all.

The mobile industry is gambling its future on the consumer sector. Why? Because what every financially troubled mobile operator and handset vendor needs is an avalanche of cash. Steady, but smallish, revenues from the corporate sector simply aren't enough to get them out of the hole they currently find themselves in.

As the operators learned through the phenomenal, but entirely unexpected, success of SMS, nothing generates piles of money like mass take-up of a consumer service. And the mobile phone makers are hoping that teenagers and other fashion-conscious individuals will be happy to spend their money on largely unnecessary handset upgrades to keep up with their friends.

Admittedly, it's early days for multimedia messaging (MMS), and there may be a whole army of software developers currently putting together any number of industry-specific mobile applications able to make good use of the multimedia abilities that the new generation of handsets can support. But whether the mobile operators are willing, or able, to prioritise corporate data traffic remains to be seen.

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