Carriers seek new business models to afford iPhone bandwidth

What’d I tell you? The carriers didn’t even wait a day before following up on the pre-meditated comments by the CEO of RIM (maker of Blackberry).  Here comes the Net Neutrality battle all over again. Guess what? Google’s gonna win, so build some more towers.

Vittorio Colao, CEO of Vodafone, said at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Spain, on Tuesday that the demand for data in mobile devices has become a problem for carriers. According to Reuters, he specifically named Google and said the company should not be allowed to control the flow of money through dominating the search and advertising market. To get their fair share, Colao said, carriers could charge customers more for greater bandwidth, or guaranteed high speeds. They could also charge content providers, and guarantee them bandwidth speeds as well.

Vodafone was also among the carriers that yesterday announced an über-app platform that will supposedly work across a diverse array of devices and carriers.  For such a standard to exist requires the worst kinds of compromise, taking out of account the unique strengths that each device brings to bear, as well as limiting the code to languages understood by all of the platforms. In this case, that would mean only HTML and Javascript.

There are some great iPhone webapps, but they can’t hold a candle to those that run in Cocoa Touch. The carrier app store model will fail, as will their attempts to continue to fight their way into content. The sooner they realize that they are destined to be dumb pipes, the sooner they can get to improving their networks and making their businesses more efficient; that’s their only path to higher profits.

Blackberry Maker RIM Warns of Bandwidth Crisis

Taking aim at rivals like Apple, BlackBerry-maker Research in Motion said on Tuesday that smartphone manufacturers must start developing less bandwidth-guzzling products or risk choking already congested airwaves.

Translation: Your multimedia, consumer-friendly devices are killing us, and not slowly.

“Manufacturers had better start building more efficient applications and more efficient services. There is no real way to get around this,” Lazaridis said in an interview. “If we don’t start conserving that bandwidth, in the next few years we are going to run into a capacity crunch. You are already experiencing the capacity crunch in the United States.”

Translation: Our business plan is to lobby the FCC into data rationing and provide political cover for our telco partners that decide to charge by the bit in order to weaken our competitors without strengthening our own position.

At the same time, smartphones consume 30 times as much bandwidth as a traditional cellphone, with iPhones — or “iHogs” as an analyst recently dubbed them in a report — some of the worst offenders.

Translation: The term “iHogs” was created specifically for this CNBC reporter’s use by RIM.

“That is pretty fundamental to a carrier as that means you can have three paying Blackberry browsing customers for every one other customer,” Lazaridis said.

“That has a huge advantage for the carriers if you think about the many billions of dollars the carriers have invested over the last five years in spectrum auctions and infrastructure rollouts,” he said.

The carriers, not the end-users, are our customers.  And this is based on the assumption that you can find three Blackberry purchasers for each iPhone, WinPhone7 or Android user.  I don’t think that’s going to be the case moving forward.

RIM needs to rewrite their underlying OS, make it more friendly to developers, and offer non-business users a compelling reason to use their product. Because the issue is, there’s no such thing as a business phone customer anymore. There are just people using phones they want to use. Ask the IT guys that have been implementing iPhones like crazy at the enterprise level.