[CSG Fall 2008] Policy Discussion: Mobile & Converged Device Plans

Andrew Yu from MIT starts off the discussion by loioking at the Mobile Device landscape. BlakBerry is dominant platform, followed by iPhone in US. Then WIndows Mobile. Palm OS is dying out, Symbian is not offered by any US carriers currently, Android will be coming on soon.

Bill Clebsch – Stanford. What is a converged device? People feel their landlines no longer offer value. Some kind of tradeoff needs to be made to capture the revenue stream. Multiple identities are important to people – home vs. work. People need their device to serve different needs at different times – people’s university number to ring to their cell at some times but not others. But people need less devices. Launching pilot with AT&T to make calls over wifi networks and route.

Andy Palms – Michigan – intent is to redirect funds being spent on landlines. Currently majority of devices are owned individually – want to be able to leverage that to provide the enterprise telephone service.

Jim Jolkl – Virginia – Need to figure out how to control what people get on their phones.

Andrew – MIT tried out Nokia E61 devices – but people weren’t familiar with them. Would be nice to have a single device for fixed-mobile convergence. Likely to take 2-3 years for devices to support wifi calling, not dropping when moving to cellular, etc. MIT working on mobile web applications. Launched in June, traffic growing exponentially. Traffic is 70% iPhone.

Klara asks whether universities have had any luck in persuading carriers to open up the application space universally on their phones. Short answer is no.

MIT working with Gemalto on programmable universal sim cards.