Doubleplus ungood! Big Brother’s designs on mobile

The two mobile trade shows that feature the carriers and other major industry players — CTIA and Mobile World Congress — have now wrapped up, giving us the Big Brother providers’ view of the mobile world they want to impose on you. (CTIA ended just yesterday; the congress ran a month ago.)

As always, the carriers and major device makers make a lot of promises that they often don’t keep and continue to trot out promises they won’t deliver. But some key trends are emerging from these industry Big Brothers that both IT and users should be aware of. Let me translate their announcements and intents for you, especially those that have hidden “Big Brother ungood” in mind.

The carriers are looking for new ways to make you spend more No surprise: The carriers’ business models are all about luring you into their walled garden and extracting as much from you as possible while preventing you from leaving. Two-year contracts, high termination fees, and friends-and-family plans are how they trap you. Text messaging fees, data plan fees, and hidden surcharges on unlimited data and data services you didn’t mean to use are all examples of how they want to strip you bare.

At the two conferences, the carriers continued to whine about how they can’t support all that mobile data usage and why they need tiered pricing — that is, higher rates. Trust me, it’s coming: The Apple iPad’s two-tier 3G access plan at AT&T Wireless is the first explicit test. (The carriers have always had hidden limits in their “unlimited” data plans.)

It’s true that the carriers’ profits increased negligibly in 2009 despite signing up all those iPhone, Android, and BlackBerry users, who pay more each month than regular users. This fact is what the carriers will use to justify the need for more fees and price hikes — never mind their profit margins continue to be among the highest of any industry. As George Orwell’s Big Brother would say, “Doubleplus ungood.”

Here are two examples of new ways the carriers will look to extract more money from you:

First, Verizon Wireless announced plans for a mobile payment system that will let you charge up to $25 per month to your mobile bill if you purchase via your smartphone from approved sellers. It’s a great idea, though Verizon will of course get a cut of the sales, as the credit card processors, PayPal, and the banks do when they process a payment.

But here’s the ungood Big Brother part: Verizon is also relying on a text-messaging approach to confirm payments. That will add a fee of 10 to 30 cents per transaction to anyone who doesn’t pay for unlimited texting and thus drive many users to pay $5 to $10 per month for a text-messaging plan. Never mind that text messages costs the carriers practically nothing to deliver.

Second, AT&T Wireless announced the iPhone client for its Mobile Enterprise Applications Platform, which is a service that lets you deploy Web apps — not real apps — to Windows Mobile, BlackBerry, and now iPhone users.

Like many mobile management offerings, there’s much less to this service than meets the eye: It’s for salesforce, field force, and IT ticketing apps, and it is focused on provisioning access to Web-based apps — something you could do more comprehensively using other means. Plus, it adds more proprietary applications to your IT mix (and anyhow, shouldn’t your enterprise app vendors be responsible for “mobilizing” their apps?).

Many vendors see IT concerns over the invasion of mobile devices in their companies as a great excuse to sell warmed-over management tools to fearful IT and security execs. Beware: Many of these tools duplicate native capabilities in Microsoft Exchange, BlackBerry Enterprise Server, and Apple’s iPhone Configuration Utility. They may add some incremental convenience or value, but they’re just as likely to add yet another management layer to your organization, with the extra costs and complexity that brings. And they usually do much less than you’re initially led to believe. They’re a prime opportunity for profiteering through FUD, so be careful if you go down that road.

The only good news: While continuing to blame everyone else for the problems that AT&T has had in supporting iPhone users, AT&T mobility chief Ralph de la Vega did suggest that the carriers themselves might do something to relieve congestion. For example, the carrier is relying more on Wi-Fi networks (that may explain the greater number of AT&T Wi-Fi hotspots that now offer free access) and cellular devices called femtocells that essentially add a small-range cellular network in your home or office that uses your landline broadband connection to divert traffic away from the carriers’ overwhelmed cell towers. But behind that good news is bad news: AT&T is happy to sell you the femtocells for $150, and of course you’re paying for the wired broadband service you connect them to — so you get to foot the bill to reduce AT&T’s cellular bandwidth woes.

Of course, in typical Big Brother fashion, De la Vega told the U.S. government to stay out of wireless — meaning don’t regulate prices or impose Net neutrality — while also asking the government for more spectrum. You know the contradiction: The government is good when it gives you free or cheap services but bad when it tries to impose regulation to prevent abusive behavior: doublethink ungood.

Fake 4G pitches are gaining ground Keep in mind that despite all the hype, mobile is a very slow market. The buildout of new technologies does take years and billions of dollars (which is why 3G coverage is still not where it needs to be, a decade after its rollout began), and even up-and-comers such as the iPhone take years to get a strong presence in the market.

Sprint Nextel is now actively promoting so-called 4G smartphones and service using a technology (WiMax) that was promised a decade ago and is now available in a couple dozen or so cities. (It’s not 4G, despite what Sprint says. The actual 4G technology — LTE — is still being developed and won’t begin serious rollouts until 2013, though you’ll see limited test deployments as early as this fall.) Given the feverish 4G pitches not only by the carriers, but also by consumer electronics publications such as PC World and Cnet that are already running “smackdowns” for 4G phones that haven’t shipped, it’s quite easily to believe the exaggerated, premature, and sometimes outright false claims.

Here’s the truth: Sprint’s 4G network (provided by Sprint’s affiliate Clearwire) is very limited, so the HTC Evo, the Android-based WiMax smartphone it will sell, won’t be able to take advantage of the WiMax networks in most places. Instead, you’ll get regular 3G speeds. And early customers have complained about the slow “4G” service offered by Clearwire. Maybe that’s why Sprint and Clearwire’s CEOs now say they may adopt the true 4G technology, LTE.

The good news is that indications are so far that Sprint will not charge a separate data-access fee for its 4G smartphones; it recently dropped such fees for 3G devices. However, note that there’s a 5GB monthly limit for data transfer on the 3G network (you pay 5 cents per megabyte after that) and a 300MB data limit when roaming. The bad news: The $99-per-month unlimited voice and data plan costs as much as the competitors’ unlimited voice plan with data plan added (also $99 per month when added together) — so despite Sprint’s marketing that says it’s “dropped” the additional fee for data, it really hasn’t. Doubleplus ungood.

As Sprint makes more noise about its not-really-4G network, expect the other carriers to talk about their 4G LTE plans — even though you won’t actually be able to get the service for years. It’s about marketing, not accuracy.

Android is getting real momentum The carriers and device makers are used to delivering new, regular cell phone models every few months, but these devices are as much as about fashion and attention-seeking as anything else. That creates the myth that mobile is fast-moving market. It is for cell phones, but not for smartphones and the data-oriented devices that people are really excited about.

So all the announcements at Mobile World Congress and CTIA about device makers’ plans to roll out Android devices this year is meaningful. It’s been 18 months since the first Android device (the HTC G1) hit the market, and already most major device makers not wed to their own platform (that is, Apple, Nokia, Palm, and RIM) have announced Android devices, as have all the major U.S. carriers.

Microsoft also managed — though over many more years — to get that kind of adoption for its mobile platform, Windows Mobile. But it let the platform stagnate and has seen its user base dwindle. Android is essentially replacing Windows Mobile as the major platform that all the carriers and Asian device makers are betting on.

Windows Phone 7 may resurrect Microsoft in mobile — although it won’t be out for six to nine months, the slow pace of mobile means it’s not too late — but Android is now the “establishment” platform.

Where’s the Big Brother ungood here? There may not be any. In fact, it could be doubleplus good, as Apple gets a much-needed challenger to the iPhone as the BlackBerry continues its slide into messaging-only irrelevance, as Palm’s capable WebOS continues to gain carrier signups but few customers, as Nokia continues to screw around with five-year plans, and as we wait to see if Microsoft stages a comeback in mobile. Doubleplus interesting!

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This article, “Doubleplus ungood! Big Brother’s designs on mobile,” was originally published at InfoWorld.com. Read more of Gruman et al.’s Mobile Edge blog and follow the latest developments in mobile computing at InfoWorld.com.