Telephony 2.0

[Editor's Note: Who should be telecom's candidate to be national CTO? Nominate your candidate in the comments below]

Interesting peek into the political process from Business Week today, with speculation on Barack Obama’s plans to name a national chief technology officer if elected.

The CTO title fits the Obama profile — it’s a flashier title than chief information office, or CIO. CIOs are hands-on implementers; CTOs, for better or worse, tend to be the visionary types.

So who’s on the short list, at least according to BW: Vint Cerf, Google’s chief Internet evangelist (and Internet pioneer); Microsoft’s Steve Ballmer; Amazon’s Jeffrey Bezos; and Ed Felton, Princeton University comsci professor.

This list is particularly interesting when one takes into account the apparent goal of this would-be CTO: raising national broadband penetration. From the BW story:

“Obama sees greater broadband penetration as an enormous economic engine, much like the railroads were a century ago,” says Andrew D. Lipman, a veteran communications lawyer in Washington. “That is why the CTO will play such a critical role in any recovery plan.”

If broadband deployment is the key to our economic future, why do the potential CTOs including a search engine exec (ok, that’s a bit unfair to Cerf — if accurate), CEO of a desktop software company, CEO of an e-commerce company and an Ivy League professor?

Where’s the candidate representing today’s actual broadband industry? I’m not saying an incumbent telecom industry player would be the best choice — someone with a lack of conflicts and deep industry ties could probably get more done.

But the list of proposed candidates show a lack of respect toward the mainstream telecom sector and a lack of understanding of the complexities and challenges of truly building a national broadband infrastructure.

It also is a relatively bad omen for the traditional telecom industry, which may be viewed more as having impeded choice and a path to the broadband future than enabling it.  The industry already has a fairly combative relationship with the FCC, do we need to be battling the “Office of the National CTO” as well?

So who should be added to that list from the telecom sector. Here’s some possibilities gathered from a quick poll of the Telephony staff:

- Larry Irvin, former head of NTIA and current co-chair of the Internet Innovation Alliance.

- Bill Smith, former BellSouth CTO

- Mark Wegleitner, current Verizon CTO

- Barry West, Xohm, Sprint/Nextl

- Rob Pullen, CEO, Tellabs

We want your opinion: Who should be telecom’s candidate to be national CTO? Nominate your candidate in the comments below.

[Note: Obama/Superman photo courtesy of Mashable, which wrote about the CTO idea when it was first floated earlier this summer.]

[Editor’s Note: We want your thoughts on this controversial development. Should operators be allowed to raise SMS service fees? Give us your opinion in the comments section of this story on our Web site and we’ll highlight the best responses in an upcoming follow-up story.]

With Verizon Wireless apparently weighing the possibility of charging a 3-cent-per-message fee to SMS aggregators, text messaging business models may be in for a reevaluation as well.
Here’s the back story: an email from Verizon’s billing provider OpenMarket detailing the new fee began circulating among aggregators and content providers this week, setting off a flood of media coverage and criticism against Verizon. Verizon officials denied its decision was final, while admitting it does plan to reassess the fees it charges aggregators, in part to better reflect network costs. Verizon said it has not increased per-message fees to third-party providers since its SMS service launched in 2003.

This is a big deal to SMS such as mBlox and VeriSign, as well as the content companies that leverage those aggregators to deliver SMS text alerts, promotions and interactive voting notifications. Some examples would be TV shows like American Idol, which conduct SMS voting; SMS-based “answer” services like ChaCha or Google Answers; and Web-based messaging services like Twitter. Such services, which rely on relatively low-cost SMS to augment their existing content distribution, would be hard-pressed to swallow such a large potential fee increase.

SMS is a huge business. At the CTIA show earlier this year, the trade group said that operators at that time were delivering more than 75 billion text messages every month.

Because of Verizon’s non-committal response, uncertainty in the SMS market will rein – at least for the time being. The larger question is if Verizon ups its rates, will other operators follow their lead? As for content providers, they may have little choice but to raise rates to end-users, putting into question existing business models that factor current SMS rates into their equation. With ubiquitous access SMS’s key selling point, no content provider would likely be willing to simply abandon one third of the nation’s wireless customers in order to avoid Verizon’s would-be charges. But could their business models hold up?

For operators, the timing of such proposed rate hikes could be a challenge. Already, Web access on mobile devices is rising, potentially offering a messaging alternative to SMS. Further, the government is looking closely at SMS rates already – rate hikes will only draw more attention. Last month, Senate Judiciary antitrust subcommittee Chairman Herb Kohl (D-Wis.) sent a letter to mobile operators raising concerns about recent text messaging price increases.

We want your opinion: are service providers within their rights – and is it good business – to be raising SMS rates to third party providers? Let us know what you think in the comments section below.

At last week’s Telephony Live event in Chicago, panelist Thomas Howe tried to downplay some of the iPhone App Store love in the room and told the audience to look at RIM and the Blackberry for another, more enterprise-focused application strategy.

Well don’t look now, but a Blackberry app store is apparently just around the corner as well, if we’re to believe the leaks (courtesy of Crackberry.com). The store will be on-device, which, beyond the obvious UI advances Apple has brought to the game, is really the biggest game-changer with ALL the new app stores — easy access to apps right on the device.

Even more intriguingly, RIM has apparently found room for mobile operators to be part of its app strategy, says Crackberry.com:

While the iPhone App Store is the one-and-only hub for developers to sell apps and consumers to purchase them, it seems RIM is really providing the Application Center as an additional tool for carriers to more easily distribute their supported apps (think carrier billing for apps that are not free). At this point I’m not expecting to see thousands of BlackBerry Apps available for purchase on-device anytime soon (carriers tend to be pretty stringent in terms of what they’re going to support).

The opposite of the apparent RIM strategy isn’t Apple but Android, whose app store will have a very low bar of participation, in keeping with its open source, Web-centric focus.

It makes good sense, if it’s true, for RIM to keep close ties with mobile operators. Carriers are good partners — and sales channels — for not only RIM devices but Blackberry push email service. And with a more enterprise focus, operators will be able to help market, distribute and possibly even help bill and support Blackberry apps.

It’s good to see variations on the app store — especially ones that aren’t all about routing around mobile operators.

Not to say there won’t be RIM route-arounds: an independent, on-device store — BerryStore.com –  just went into beta.

May the best apps strategy win.