Technology Birthday
So the mobile telephone industry (GSM) is twenty years old! Of course there were crude versions of mobile technology available long before this, but the industry as most of us know it is now twenty years on.
If we look back at the early years, we had crude, featureless handsets, locked into networks that were unable to perform…and the funny part of it is, that it was totally acceptable to the consumer - in those early days, phones were not supposed to work and the term 'dropped call' was reserved for those who were 'in the know'. At the time, my own career was with an IT technology company and our focus was on finding specific talent to operate and program huge mainframe computers and the industry was booming. In the late 80's, communications had been revolutionized by the mobile phone, but there was still no direct link to the IT world, from the consumer perspective.
In 1992, during a deep technology recession, I first became exposed to the mobile industry - the IT sector was drying up and I received a call from a mobile engineer who was looking for a new opportunity. "Can you find me a job", he said and being the true entrepreneur and with absolutely no experience of the mobile industry, I said "of course, the industry is about to boom and would you know anyone else who might be ooking"? "Sure, I'll send some of my friends to you", came the reply. Now I had the start of a new industry - five people in an industry I new nothing about, who were looking for jobs in companies I had never contacted and in some cases, never heard of! Being the entrepreneur, I had just found my new opportunity - I would switch from IT to mobile telecommunications and specialize solely in this field and gain as much knowledge as humanly possible - in fact, I never looked back and this was the start of a huge growth phase of my telecommunications and technology staffing business, dataworkforce and later on, the opportunity to co-found the wireless software and services business, Cerion.
Now we are looking at the convergence of telecommunications and IT, to deliver mobile broadband and the challenge here is not so much the complexity of the networks, but what are we going to do with them? For me, we are going to see an era of consolidation and a reliance on IT personnel to deliver the type of 'killer' applications that the consumer now expects - the same consumer who did not really expect early technology to work, is now very 'technology aware' and more importantly, demanding! The industry faces a huge challenge, especially in the cost of ownership of networks and particularly from companies outside of the traditional telecommunications industry, Google being a good example. We are moving toward a 'one world network', where you will simply plug in and do what you need to do - phone calls, video, games, television, movies, shopping etc, will be available everywhere, whether 3G, WiFi or simply from your home computer, the means of delivery will be academic.
~ Neil
Technorati Tags: GSM, 3G, Technology, Staffing, Internet, Broadband
