Laughing last and laughing longest, the telcos are back, bold, and in your face. 

It is fashionable to contend that Wi-Fi and its mutant offspring are all-conquering in the broadband sphere. Our American cousins, who never really understood mobile telephony, contend that taking your laptop into a branch of Starbucks is the ultimate broadband experience. I would argue that this says more about our American friends, and their umbilical links to their laptops, and their strange obsession with the dark-coloured mush served up by Starbucks under the name 'coffee' – than it does about broadband.

3G and its wireless derivatives, such as Wi-Fi, WiMax, WiBro and, for all I know, WiNot?, are not broadband access technologies. They might, just, be broadcast technologies for stripped down Internet access or even the delivery of TV services. VoIP American-style has already piloted this same somewhat shaky boat. The best thing that can be said about hyped Skype-type quality is that it sounds almost as good as a mobile being used in the street. Bottom line... it sounds like rubbish.

A telecom industry fixated by the notion of early adopters is the least well placed to divine new market segments, surely. The mobile sector, which goes all ‘preening peacock’ when describing the runaway success of SMS, conveniently ignores the fact that text messaging became a phenomenon despite of, rather than because of, any industry initiative.

Most of the mobile industry is brand-obsessed but service-lite. Across Europe, mobile providers are worried over whether they will manage to introduce a truly innovative broadband service, attractive to users, that will inundate their networks with demand for capacity. If that happened, those very networks would likely fall over. 

It is not a new thought but words written here once before are worth repeating: “damningly, most of the bolt-on features of today’s mobile [handsets] are poor (although not cheap) imitations of the real thing. Digital camera facilities are the most obvious case in point, but represent only the tip of an iceberg whose limitations are so routinely and cruelly exposed: think keypads, think predictive text, think sound quality, think video quality, think on… Buy a top-of-the range mobile handset and you get second best everything:” One could add that they aren't very good telephones, either.

Not to get carried away, but our globe has revolved unstoppably with thousands if not millions of parents buying this second-rate hardware for their children. All in the name of progress. That, too, is a rubbish concept. Camera-enabled mobile telephones were the must-have Christmas present in much of the world last week. How sad. What rubbish.

While herd-like consumers seek short-term succour in second-rate solutions, broadband is ripping away conventional thinking on utilities. Here’s a novel concept: broadband access to the Internet is a utility. Water, heating, gas, electricity and Internet connectivity are all utilities. They might be priced as such... which provides the setting for an in-depth follow-up to this article, appearing next week.

These technologies also enable us to close the social divide. In case you have forgotten what that means, it’s about children and adults and entire villages dying for lack of access to basic services, of which broadband must be counted as one now. At an ADB conference some years back, I sat in astonishment while a WHO official pointed out the correlation between infant death in a particular country and the provision of communication services there. It was the first and only time I had seen preventable child disease correlated with (lack of) access to Internet technology. It was also the first time that this particular WHO official had seen it. In short, it was an obscenity.

With dampened spirits, I will say that the future of broadband is as likely to be wired, as wireless, and that this will turn mobile telephony on its head. Wireless luminaries, including Vodafone and Starbucks and the Gucci-shod loudmouths from MIT, have not realised this yet. They also do not seem to care too much for their social responsibilities.

In a voice world, we could speak of mobile ‘substitution’ for fixed telephones. That still stands. But this is a broadband world. Mobile operators should scramble to find a position therein before it's too late. Otherwise they will find themselves substituted. And not mourned.
Jim Chalmers