Telepocalypse

Social clubbing

Vodafone publish/sponsor a great R&D magazine called Receiver. This month is about being “out and about” and nightlife. A deconstruction of mobile use by nightclubbers was a good read.

This underscores the utter social unawareness of the communications tools we use, and how tragically locked we’ve become into the deathly grip of the vertically integrated telephony application. People in nightclubs use SMS for obvious reasons (although I grinned at the idea that you had to get your texting done before the dissociative drugs kick in). But imagine for a moment if your voicemail had the slightest concept of the difference between a call from your wife/girlfriend, your friends and that from a random stranger. All the telcos have to do it pass on the SS7 signals to some 3rd party service provider and let nature and commerce take its course!

If a more flexible and less closed wireless broadband infrastructure gets deployed, the 3G write-downs you’ve seen so far are only the beginning. The mobility party carries on for the users, but it’s time for a lot of the carriers to shuffle off to the chill-out zone and deal with the come-down from their artificial euphoria.