Over the last week, the blogosphere (sic...) has been ablaze with stories pointing out that the buoyant mobile broadband market may be hitting a plateau.
Basically two reports by analysts Omnitele and Strand Consult have pointed out the fact that the current excellent deals offered by the various telecoms suppliers are really too good to be true. Well from a suppliers point anyway. Even though the likes of T-Mobile are reporting excellent mobile broadband sales figures, it's actually costing the operators a lot of money to offer mobile broadband at such rates.
And inevitably it may just not be cost effective or feasible for the cash strapped telcos to offer such attractive packages for much longer.
Their two reports are well constructed and well detailed and offer detailed explanations as to why there could be trouble ahead.
But what should not be forgotten is that even though mobile broadband is costly, it's still very much of a nascent market and any price increases could well kill off stone dead the market before it gets a chance to mature and then adopt more measured (that is dearer) service charges. This is a fundamental rule of business.
The question is who has the deep packets to go along for the full ride?
The popularity and potential of mobile broadband could be well judged by one of the year's most surprising pieces of news: that Nokia will likely enter the laptop market at some point in the future.
News agency Reuters reported on 25 February Chief Executive Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo revealing to Finnish national broadcaster YLE that Nokia was looking actively at the laptop market.
Nokia has always had a high opinion of its top devices, describing the high-end devices such as the n95 as computers rather than mere phones. Now it has to come up with the real McCoy. It will be fascinating to see what arrives - if it ever does...
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