At work, I’m involved in one of the most exciting technology-driven changes to our societies ever. At home, I’m a mother of a three-year-old daughter. There is a surprising similarity between these two experiences. Small children and technology never stay still for long, and both surprise you every day. Some surprises are good, some are less so, but it’s amazing to watch both a child and technology develop at a break-neck speed.
We take it for granted that we can walk into any high street phone shop and walk out with a device with more processing power than the average desktop computer had only a few years ago. A typical laptop in the year 2000 had a 700Mhz CPU, 128Mb of RAM and 12Gb of storage. Today a good smartphone will have a dual-core 1.5Ghz CPU, 1 Gb of RAM and up to 64Gb of storage.
Of course, most people don’t care about the technical specs of their device. They care about what they can do with it and, like my daughter, they always want to do more. They care about how fast they can do things, how efficiently they can do things but, most of all, they care about what they do.
Networks drive so much of what people want to do with their devices. Without today’s networks there would be no app downloads, Dropbox synchronisation or WhatsApp chats. Imagine trying to make a video Skype call on GPRS, or play Angry Birds on a 2002 mobile phone. Just syncing your music library via EDGE would take forever. These are not comparable to the great consumer experiences we can deliver today.
There’s no doubt people change technology; but technology changes people, too. At Qualcomm, we pride ourselves on being an enabler of mobile connectivity. We see the changes happening incrementally, via small stages, all building to massive changes.
For example, tablets are creating rapid changes today. But they have been around since at least 1992 with the Compaq Concerto. Why did the Concerto, and all the tablets that followed, not fly off the shelves?
The time wasn’t right. The networks weren’t ready. The ecosystems that could support such a device weren’t ready. Therefore, the consumers weren’t ready.
Just as handset manufacturers upgrade their devices every year to keep pace with consumers demanding to do more, networks need to evolve to keep up with their insatiable demand for speed. We’ve gone from 9.6 kilobytes per second modems in the 90s to the point where consumers are beginning to regard 10MB/s as “so yesterday”. They will always want more speed, more bandwidth, and we will have to keep working to provide it.
Our mobile devices are no longer just for making calls and sending text messages. They are the computing devices at the centre of our lives. This is the revolution that will change industries – and societies. A phone call is no longer your only option for contacting someone from the device. It can be a Facebook message, or a What’s App chat, or an Instagram photo. And it’s as likely to be a business connection as a personal one, as the usage of devices blurs the personal and the corporate.
That’s going to impact all sorts of businesses. For example, retail has to deal with informed consumers who can research prices – and buy from competitors – while they’re in a store. And that’s not just a trend of the young. Figures from the UK show that over-55’s are the biggest growth group in online shopping.
The winners will be those businesses that can react most quickly to these changes. They will be the ones that cater to multiple communications channels, that allow their employees to use personal devices for work purposes – or which provide the devices they want. They will be the ones that imagine how their businesses can interact with these mobile devices to give their customers what they want: faster, smarter and better.
They will grow the ecosytems that flow through these devices. We, the wireless industry, will bring the networks needed to support this. The world we create will surprise us all.