Are mobile operators in danger of losing their 'default' status

David Isenberg has been writing cogently on the distribution of the iPhone in the US and he notes that, however the battle between Verizon and AT&T pans out the big winner will be Apple.

"Wi-fi is the wild card in all these plans," says Isenberg in a recent blog posting.

"The simplest scenario would be this: Apple makes WiFi the default network for the iPhone, with licensed mobile spectrum the fall-back (if the device owner has an account). Presto. Change-o. iPhone-based lucre for AT&T and Verizon . . . pffft.

Under this scenario, using licensed spectrum would be like smoking. First you wouldn’t use it in stores and restaurants. Then you wouldn’t use it in your house. Soon, there will be no need to do it on trains, planes or busses. You’ll only do it in your car, or if you’re walking. Winner: Apple."

And we all know what smoking does for you.

As what we used to call the mobile 'terminal' changes into some sort of electronic ultra-intelligent Swiss army knife, the power balance changes across the industry. Winners include WiFi operators and smartphone vendors - they become competitors with mobile operators over control of the 'customer experience' as the marketing jargon has it.

But mobile telcos (and their suppliers) sometimes seem to be living in a silo, especially when it come to pricing and tariff structures for mobile broadband and the (apparent) requirement for operators to force a re-write of the rule-book by banishing Internet neutrality.

The obvious fact is that licenced mobile broadband is not the only game in town; the other sport is WiFi and it's no use reverting to the "WiFi is unmanaged, clunky and incoherent as a service offering" line of argument. For users, the experience of using WiFi at home and via hotspots is often (nay, nearly always) better than using 3G.

Not only is it free (or at least radically cheaper) it performs well at the things that most users want to do - access Web sites and content and have them perform nearly as well as they do on the desktop. And, with the arrival of smartphone apps to do clever things, the experience will get slicker yet (see - Femto-killer: Kineto launches mobile network offload using WiFi).

If Apple's iPad does nothing else, its success as a non-carrier product (at present it has no connectivity except via WiFi) should be seen as a calculated shot across the carrier bows. Apple (perhaps as Google also did with the Nexus One) is signalling 'we don't need you, licenced wireless operators are an optional extra'.