Blackberry Maker RIM Warns of Bandwidth Crisis
Taking aim at rivals like Apple, BlackBerry-maker Research in Motion said on Tuesday that smartphone manufacturers must start developing less bandwidth-guzzling products or risk choking already congested airwaves.
Translation: Your multimedia, consumer-friendly devices are killing us, and not slowly.
“Manufacturers had better start building more efficient applications and more efficient services. There is no real way to get around this,” Lazaridis said in an interview. “If we don’t start conserving that bandwidth, in the next few years we are going to run into a capacity crunch. You are already experiencing the capacity crunch in the United States.”
Translation: Our business plan is to lobby the FCC into data rationing and provide political cover for our telco partners that decide to charge by the bit in order to weaken our competitors without strengthening our own position.
At the same time, smartphones consume 30 times as much bandwidth as a traditional cellphone, with iPhones – or “iHogs” as an analyst recently dubbed them in a report – some of the worst offenders.
Translation: The term “iHogs” was created specifically for this CNBC reporter’s use by RIM.
“That is pretty fundamental to a carrier as that means you can have three paying Blackberry browsing customers for every one other customer,” Lazaridis said.
“That has a huge advantage for the carriers if you think about the many billions of dollars the carriers have invested over the last five years in spectrum auctions and infrastructure rollouts,” he said.
The carriers, not the end-users, are our customers. And this is based on the assumption that you can find three Blackberry purchasers for each iPhone, WinPhone7 or Android user. I don’t think that’s going to be the case moving forward.
RIM needs to rewrite their underlying OS, make it more friendly to developers, and offer non-business users a compelling reason to use their product. Because the issue is, there’s no such thing as a business phone customer anymore. There are just people using phones they want to use. Ask the IT guys that have been implementing iPhones like crazy at the enterprise level.
Source: cnbc.com