Two dozen operators join in massive software fightback

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Two dozen operators join in massive software fightback

Twenty four operators launch strike against internet and hardware players for control of mobile apps

By CAROLINE GABRIEL

Published: 15 February, 2010

In the ongoing war to control the mobile software experience, the operators have launched a big strike against the internet and hardware players, at their biggest event of the year, Mobile World Congress. 24 carriers have formed the Wholesale Applications Community, an alliance to build an open platform that delivers apps and services to mobile devices.

Such efforts have been made before, most notably by the Joint Innovation Lab (JIL) project of Vodafone, Verizon Wireless, Softbank and China Mobile. All those four are included in this far larger initiative, plus most of the household names in developed cellular markets - AT&T, Deutsche Telekom, KT, mobilkom austria, DoCoMo, Orange, Telecom Italia, Telefónica, Telenor, TeliaSonera, SingTel, SK Telecom, Sprint, and Wind.

Other founders come from the mobile powerhouse markets of the future, where the mobile web, applications and stores, as a driver of carrier revenue, are starting to take hold. These players include América Móvil, Bharti Airtel, China Unicom, MTN, Orascom and VimpelCom.

These operators have access to over 3bn customers worldwide, making any platform and standard interfaces that emerge hugely powerful - and virtually impossible to ignore by any of the major device vendors or operating system companies. Indeed, three hardware suppliers have already joined their support - Samsung, LG and Sony Ericsson. Of course, the big 'if' factor is what exactly will emerge from such a large group of carriers which, though they are united by a common need to control and monetize the mobile experience, are in other words disparate and with contrasting agendas.

But in the war of mobile operators versus the open web/bitpipe model, they know their key weapon is their huge market reach, and while their platform will support many OSs, browsers and applications frameworks, it will surely increase the focus of Google and even Nokia on new device formats that they can influence more directly, and that are built from scratch for the web and open, carrier neutral access.

The Wholesale Applications Community aims to "unite a fragmented marketplace and create an open industry platform that benefits everybody", according to the statement. It will "create a wholesale applications ecosystem that - from day one - will establish a simple route to market for developers to deliver the latest innovative applications and services to the widest possible base of customers around the world. In the immediate future the alliance will seek to unite members' developer communities and create a single, harmonized point of entry to make it easy for developers to join."

The initiative is supported by the GSM Association, which has in recent years come up with several operator driven programs to enable the carriers to leverage their assets and work together to create a viable mobile model. One is the OpenAPI project, which looks for a standard way to expose network interfaces to developers, to enable 'telco 2.0' services.

The new group will initially use the JIL requirements and the Open Mobile Terminal Platform's Bondi interfaces, both highly carrier driven. Ultimately, it aims to work with the W3C (the web standards body) for a common standard based on solutions from both sides, to ensure a common experience across mobile and fixed products.