I’ll have a grande latte and 3Mbps, please
I was watching TV last night and I saw the Verizon commercial where the husband and wife suggest introducing their house’s landline “network” to the wife’s cell phone “network” - but of course they know each other already because the Verizon “network” is all one big happy family (cue the Verizon theme song…). This commercial reminded me of something Stephan Scholz, CTO of Nokia Siemens Networks, said last week during his keynote at BBWF — that the war between wireless and wireline is almost over, and that both are going to win.
Scholz pointed out that wireless data has always been significantly slower than wireline, and noted that most people (save a few exceptions) have a happy marriage of both connections in their lives; their home and work computers are attached to a wireline connection, but they live wirelessly once they walk out the door. According to Scholz, this trend won’t be going away any time soon, and wireless and wireline technology will coexist peacefully (just like in the Verizon commercial) for the foreseeable future, because people will inevitably turn to wireline when they need faster speeds and bigger bandwidth.
While I don’t entirely believe that the wireless/wireline competition will ever be truly dead (there are still a lot of POTS customers to poach), what I am interested to see, is where the next big threat to both lies, if not in each other. I’m thinking Wi-Fi and WiMax, as branded companies that are already providing Wi-Fi hot spots (like Starbucks, for example) evaluate WiMax, eventually link their “hot spots” together and become carriers, themselves (remember the MVNOs?). It will be interesting to see how the market evolves!
