This was going to be a column about how market saturation is negatively affecting the growth prospects of the cellular industry, and how technology alone isn't going to save us, and why mobile broadband wireless services are perhaps further off than ever, and why marketing, not technology, is the key to the near-term growth of the industry.
And this was going to lead to a discussion of a relatively new phenomenon within cellular called the "mobile virtual network operator," or MVNO, which actually isn't a cellular company at all, but rather just a marketing organization that does branding, advertising, product labeling, distribution, billing and a bit of customer support.
As an example, I was going to look at Virgin Mobile, which recently rolled out an MVNO service in the United States aimed at twentysomethings and, of course, at WorldCom, one of the first MVNOs out there. I thought that examining how marketing is replacing technology as the focus of wide-area wireless would be an interesting topic, especially for us engineers.
Except of course that WorldCom has now gone bankrupt, the latest in what is becoming an increasingly long line of big corporate catastrophes. Before its recent filing, though, the company decided to shut down its MVNO business. Before the bankruptcy, I didn't think this was all that big a deal-it was pretty clear that WorldCom was severely overextended, that its fundamental business model was really quite flawed, and that the general downturn in telecom demand and the saturation of the consumer space in cellular were ultimately to blame.
Had I pursued this topic, I would have said that we're likely to see even more diversity among MVNOs in the future. And, of course, that despite market saturation, advances in technology would lead to a certain amount of turnover in the customer base as new technologies spurred new demand, and thus all would be right with the universe.
But instead I've decided to focus on the problem that the WorldCom debacle illustrates so simply and effectively: that successful societies run on trust. We've got to trust the information we receive, as investors, analysts, employees and customers. When I was little I learned about "my word is my bond"-if someone says they're going to do something, they have to do it. No excuses-high quality, always. Make the experience the best it can be-put the customer first. And always tell the truth. Nothing else matters without that.
Craig Mathias is an analyst with the Farpoint Group (Ashland, Mass.).
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