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Products: iPhone

How Apple brought nervousness to telecommunications with the iPhone

The Apple iPhone has only been on the market for a short time, and the debate surrounding it continues. Now is a good time to consider why and how the iPhone has changed the telecommunications environment, if at all.

Let’s start with a broad overview.

Have you ever thought about how the worlds of telecommunications and IT are two sides of the same coin? Personally, I imagine the relationship between telecommunications and IT as that between the Persians and Greeks a few hundred years before Christ. Two huge worlds that initially take no interest in each other and have no contact whatsoever. Then diplomatic relations were established, later occasionally interrupted by border skirmishes, which both sides presented externally as a mistake, but internally as a test of the opponent’s strength. Mutual trade took place, reassuring the strategy of two global superpowers. But then one of them got the impression that it had the upper hand. It doesn’t matter whether this impression is justified. Or a provocation comes from some provincial town, the cause of which gets lost in the chain of information transmission. And the armies clash, massacre each other, and it doesn’t really matter whether one of them wins or whether the status quo is confirmed. Actually, it does matter, but that’s another story.

The IT world has been coexisting with telecommunications for a long time. Both landline and mobile. Where telecommunications companies offer dial-up telephony, IT companies are moving to packet-based VoIP. They are deploying FTTH against ADSL. And this approach clearly shows the difference in thinking.

Note the difference between circuit-switched telephone networks and packet-switched data networks. It is characteristic of the entire industry. Circuit-switched networks are networks reserved from start to finish for a single owner or purpose. No one else can technically claim it at that moment. In contrast, packet networks are reserved according to need and purpose, so you cannot say that a line is reserved for someone.

The same applies to the ecosystem. While telecommunications companies strive to control the entire chain from themselves to the client, IT companies allow third parties into the chain, collaborate, share commissions, and demand commissions.

Apple is an IT company that has entered the telecommunications world, a field previously dominated exclusively by telecommunications companies. Few others have done so yet. Microsoft has attempted to supply the Windows Mobile operating system, but it is currently seen as a tolerated supplier rather than the implementer of an independent strategy. Adobe has also made an attempt with its Flash Lite, which will be discussed later. Partly Motorola, which has attempted the second path, from telecommunications to IT, in areas where the border dispute between IT and telecommunications has escalated into an unprofitable war. There is virtually no computer manufacturer that also manufactures mobile phones. We may be confused by Fujitsu Siemens, which is definitely not the same company as Benq-Siemens, or Sony, which is not the same as Sony Ericsson. We can talk about Asian manufacturers, but they only manufacture, and their strategy is focused solely on selling at a profit as quickly as possible. They do not represent a real force (yet), although their time (and pricing) will come.

Apple has brought several innovations to the world of telecommunications with its iPhone. Let’s skip the commercial ones for now and take a look at the high-tech game Apple has started.

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