Archive notice: This article was originally published on September 7, 2007. Links and embedded videos are preserved as part of the historical record.
The new iPod generation will finally help mobile Internet achieve a breakthrough, predicts eco, the Association of the German Internet Industry. The iPod Touch recently presented by Apple CEO Steve Jobs has WLAN access to the Internet through which consumers can download music tracks and video clips.
“Steve Jobs deserves the honor of making mobile Internet a mass market,” explains eco Managing Director Harald A. Summa: “By using WLAN access instead of the mobile network, Jobs is at the same time relegating the mobile operators’ long-standing attempts to divide the mobile Internet among themselves as a closed shop.” In his view, the iPod Touch marks the beginning of the end of the mobile-network corporations’ oligopoly over mobile Internet. “Hopefully, it will also help WLAN achieve a broad breakthrough in Germany as the only truly open means of accessing the Internet on the move.”
According to the eco association’s analysis, Apple has thus ended the search for the “killer application” even before the introduction of the iPhone in Europe. Telecommunications corporations such as T-Mobile and Vodafone would have invested billions in UMTS networks, devices and marketing campaigns without so far being able to excite consumers about fast Internet access on the move on a large scale.
At the same time, to this day the corporations would have done everything to use the radio contact with the customer secured through licenses also to influence the content the consumer can access on the move. T-Zones, Web-n-walk and Vodafone Live are all attempts to keep consumers away from the free and open Internet, eco Managing Director Summa states: “It is precisely this policy of closed networks that has so far prevented mobile Internet from breaking through to the mass market. But the success of iTunes and YouTube exemplifies the fact that consumers know much better than the network operators what they really want,” Summa says. With direct WLAN access to both iTunes and YouTube, the new iPod Touch bypasses the mobile-network corporations’ closed networks.
