I agree consumers have to opt in for targeted ads (same in the EU), but at the right price (see Blyk in the UK, or Virgin Mobile’s Sugar Mama campaign in the US), some folks will do almost anything to save a buck or two.

On LBS, a big barrier has been the stranglehold carriers placed on the embedded GPS chips until recently. Once they see the success of Google Maps using cell-site triangulation to work around this, then hopefully we can stop paying $10 a month for the cruddy home-grown navigation apps.

My impression is that carriers will run parallel models (one branded, closed and controlled, and one non-branded, open and left alone) and see which works better for them. I think we all know how that’ll turn out . . .

As for consumer aimed Location Based Services – they must be free. Paid services exist for years now – how many became blockbusters? (and we know carriers’ DNA lacks the ‘free’ gene…)

Bottom line: voice ARPU is plunging, data is the future, and opening networks and devices is the end-game.

I think you can stop wavering…

Up until very recently, I was in complete agreement with your view, and wished that the operators would just stick to their knitting and focus on excellent connectivity. I am starting to waver a little, as there are a few aspects that they can really leverage, like subscriber information for ad targeting and location based services, but not wavering too much.

There does seem to be a real willingness (with at least a few US carriers) to try this open networks idea and see what happens. If the bit-pipe approach generates a new blossoming of services and new revenue models (and hopefully more revenues), then hopefully that becomes the end-game.

examples — ISDN & Intelligent Network — failures
Attempts to partner with Yahoo! etc. to create versions of AOL in the early days of dial up — lame products

So my 2 cents–

Google/Apple — create apps, operators will provide access
Operators — concentrate on providing best connectivity network…

LTE is clearly still on the drawing board, but it will still cost less to upgrade than to rip and replace with a different technology. Sprint is the only Tier-1 carrier in the world so far opting not to upgrade and go with WiMax, as far as I can tell.

I still want to see deployments of WiMax, but it will not be a credible alternative until there are large volumes of users/devices and the costs come down. Sprint/Clearwire is the biggest potential roll-out on the horizon; if it doesn’t happen or delays more than 1-2 yrs, LTE will be that much closer, and HSDPA will already have moved up to HSPA+, with speeds comparable to WiMax.