Another reason why the web fan babies are not getting it is the current price that the vast majority of people today pay for mobile Internet. This is the story of a Belgian who went on vacation for three days in Spain. He bought himself a mobile data formula and I guess he hoped that it wouldn’t be very expensive.
A few weeks after he came home he received an invoice of 18888 euros. The price per megabyte was 10 euros.
This poor guy was lucky because Proximus (the phone network company) settled the invoice for 1400 euros. For 1400 euros it would still have been cheaper to take a plane to Belgium, check your mail at home, and take a plane back to Spain. For 18888 euros … I don’t think it’s possible to schedule as much flights in three days as you could buy with 18888 euros.
I remember I told a few people at GUADEC that it would be cheaper for me to fly home every day to check my mail, than it would be to do this over GPRS in Istanbul. This story seems to verify that.
These are the prices for mobile Internet access in 2008, the year when all the web 2.0 babies started crying that all of the mobile applications should become AJAX websites.
Again the point that I’m trying to make is that instead of completely changing the strategy of products like GNOME Mobile towards webberty web stuff, maybe intelligent people should consider that maybe, just maybe, we just don’t have the wireless connections for that yet. In reality, you see, we don’t have that at all at this moment.
I’m not convinced that within the next decade we will have anything that comes close to reliable wireless Internet connections at the same coverage as GSM. Which still wouldn’t be sufficient. I mean, the connectivity of GSM is really bad if you take into account how often you don’t have a good signal.
The reason is simple: the economic model of a free wireless Internet for everybody everywhere on the entire planet, is probably just not profitable. The research to achieve this without needing a few thousand nuclear power plants and without having to hire thousands of people for maintenance of the wireless routers worldwide, is just not happening.
The political power that you’d get out of having control over this giant wireless network can much more easy be achieved by simply owning all news papers, television networks, schools, etc. What that means is that politicians wont do it either.
Or you can just find the nearest Starbucks…
With all due respect, you have to be rather .. not-so intelligent to not be able to imagine that data costs will be higher abroad than locally. Even just phone calls are a lot more expensive, so data calls will be even worse.
If you are that desperate to use data calls abroad, get a local prepaid card – it’s tons cheaper and once it’s used it’s gone – no hidden charges.
2gb in 3 days a little more than “just checking your email”
Don’t use morons to support your argument. It makes you look like one.
“Or you can just find the nearest Starbucks… “? It’s some 3000km away from this spot…
In the end, this is a temporary state of affairs. Bits are bits, and people will find ways of going around the extortionate rates of the carriers.
There’s no inherent reason why data sent internationally has to cost 10K euros per gigabyte. It certainly isn’t costing the carrier 1/1000 of that to provide it to you.
I believe that we will see reasonable priced 3G (and HSDPA) rates within most developed countries in the next few years.
In Europe almost all telcos have at least somewhat acceptable rates if you really need mobile internet access.
GPRS is not even worth thinking about, it was a dead technology it started and even 3G will not last for very long. And WiFi is also nothing for true mobile access, there you are quite right.
Still the economy of scale in the 3G networks start to flip around as prices drop almost everywhere and coverage really grows.
This will (as almost always) be most beneficial for developed countries, in particular urban areas.
But that is somewhat clear, as sparsly populated areas are not cost efficient and threshold countries and development countries will suffer from the digital divide as hard in the mobile internet world as in the wired one.
The question is, how big are your “needs” to get internet access. I see that many service providers will sell pre-paid cards at more or less affordable prices, at least for the middle- and upperclass.
On the other hand, I agree that Web 2.0 does not really fit in a mobile context. On the other hand, standalone applications need internet access too for proper communications with the outer world….
There are still some years ahead of us to really see the penetration of the 3G networks but I still believe we will see much broader spread mobile internet access in the next few years.
Several mobile operators offer flat-rate UMTS contracts. Others offer much better rates for GPRS than Proximus/Belgacom (or other Belgian operators like Mobistar or BASE).
In fact, if you go anywhere North (Scandinavia) or South of Belgium, you will find much better rates. Fixed and mobile telephony tariffs in Belgium are a disaster.
There are people for whom mobile Internet is affordable.
Finally, someone who gets it.
Web apps are neat, sure. They’re very useful in some cases, and I’m glad to have them. That said NOT EVERY APP SHOULD BE A WEB APP.
I find it very funny that the Web 2.0 hippies seem to think that mobile data coverage is utterly ubiquitous and cheap, when it’s *not*, and won’t be for many years. Even here in Minneapolis, MN, in the US, we have a city-wide WiFi network, but what happens when you leave city limits? That’s not terribly “mobile”.
And forget about using mobile phone networks for your data connection – how many people can really afford to throw $100 out the window every month *per household member* just to have Teh Intarwebs everywhere they go?
Finally, the moment someone tells me that an app like Rhythmbox should be a f*cking WEB APP is the moment I stop listening. Some apps really do make sense to just be web apps. Some apps just make sense to be *LOCAL*. Why do people have to pretend that it has to be all one or the other?
Have you ever tried Opera Mini? It compresses data before downloading it (server side), making the Internet connection seem faster and saving you a lot of money.