It's (still) about the network
Image by Jaleesa Bartley
Mobile
09.09.2010
In:
Technology
In 1999, I began working for Sprint PCS. One of my first projects was to launch the T3000 — a mobile phone aimed squarely at the business segment. And, with a $700 price tag, business segment meant executives.
The phone was a modern mobile miracle — you could actually synchronize your contacts and calendar to the phone, as long as it was tethered to your PC. And yes, it had to be a PC — no Macs allowed. At the time, smartphones made up approximately 00.00 percent of the market. The term hadn’t even been invented yet.
A couple of years later, I had the privilege of using one of the first air cards. People in airports marveled as I pulled out the PC Card (this was before USB ports), unfolded the tiny antenna and accessed the Internet at a blazing 14.4 kbps max (this was before airport Wi-Fi — or any Wi-Fi). I’d proudly show how I could access my Exchange server at work wirelessly — if onlookers had about 10 minutes to wait. Oh, and again, no support for Macs.
These scenarios are laughable today. If it takes more than half a second for the screen on your iPhone, Droid or BlackBerry to materialize, you’re taking it back to the store. Access to email, contacts and calendar information is ubiquitous. Users measure the value of their smartphones by the user experience and the size of their application stores, with Apple’s iPhone leading the way at 160,000+ applications.
Today, 25 to 35 percent of all mobile phones in the U.S. market are smartphones. These devices are expected to increase more than 500 percent in new sales from 2010 into 2011. Although RIM BlackBerry devices still have the largest market share, Apple’s iPhone is credited with creating a huge upswing in smartphone sales — and rightfully so, bringing a completely new and much more friendly user experience to mobile web browsing and application use. iPhone holds second place in market share and Google’s Android platform, in third place, is actually the fastest growing smartphone platform in 2010.
But no matter what smartphone you use, web browsing, application performance, messaging and access to email and calendars are all inherently dependent on one thing: network performance. When diving into the mobile marketing world, you need to ask two questions with respect to networks:
1. Where is my target market?
Is your market concentrated in big cities, small towns or rural areas? And which big cities? High-speed wireless data access is still not widely available in small towns and rural areas. And the user experience could vary from city to city — just ask an iPhone user in New York City compared to Chicago and you’ll get wildly different responses (recall that AT&T temporarily halted sales of iPhones in New York City earlier this year due to the burden on its network). You will need to tailor your mobile applications to fit your typical user’s access speeds.
2. How is my target market most likely going to access my content?
Do your targets hang out at coffee shops and airports — almost all of which provide Wi-Fi access today? Or do they work in the field and depend on 3G speeds? Or, overlapping with the earlier question, do your field targets work in cities with newly launched wireless 4G services offered by companies like Sprint and Clear? You need to be aware of the bandwidth required for the applications you are making for your targets.
It may not seem like network technology and coverage should concern marketers when making decisions about expanding their brand to the mobile world. But remember this the next time you hear someone complaining about how poorly an application performs on his iPhone or wondering why a mobile website looks so bad on her BlackBerry.
