Letting a hundred virtual mobile networks blossom and a hundred schools of thought contend...

The mobile industry is sprinting at a hundred miles an hour in ten different directions. Among other things, it is becoming the world's most important internet service provider, a seriously important channel for media distribution, the best billing system on the planet, a distributed organisation and communication system in repressive societies, a platform for application developers, a corporate email provider and a transnational banking and money transfer system.

An industry destined to transform so many sectors of the economy needs thousands of players, with a tough, scrappy free-for-all among entrepreneurs feeding the occasional battle-tested survivor into the big league. Right now, all we have is a succession of stale geographic  duopolies or triopolies (yes, I invented that word), and the sooner that situation goes away, the better.    

That's why I am pretty interested in this CommsMEA story, on the launch of the third "virtual" mobile network in Oman....
This one is in partnership with the MBC television network, and has some kind of special proposition for young Arabic-speakers. I'll try and find out more about this today, but until then, allow me to rant a little bit about why I think these kind of "virtual" networks are super important for the industry.

Today we think of mobile networks as these giant clunky monolithic corporations with thousands of employees and billions in revenues. But that is just a relic, a quirk of an industry that is forced by regulators to tie up its infrastructure side with the service side.

You can get a thousand different types of credit card, from every bank on the planet, some branded with the logo of an airline or supermarket. But there is really just a few global credit card networks. The infrastructure of the industry (the Visa / Mastercard networks, etc) has been decoupled from the service providers, who can make niche products like my Etihad visa card that gives me frequent flier miles for all the dollars I spend.

The point is, when you split infrastructure from services, really interesting little business models can emerge. Some will flourish, most will die, but good ideas quickly rise to the surface and become mainstream.

That is why the mobile virtual network operator (MVNO) should be the business model of the future for the mobile industry. I've written lots about MVNOs before, but in short, the idea is that you buy wholesale minutes of access to an existing network like Etisalat or du, and then resell them through your own branded "network".

It's a lightweight, low-barriers model for little innovative businesses to get into the market with a targeted service and/or experimental business model. You can offer a free, advertising supported service like Blyk in the UK, or a high-end luxury service like Nokia/Vertu in Japan. You can target expatriate workers, like Friendi does in Oman, and in the same breath, also target Gulf nationals and Arabic speakers, as Friendi/MBC are now doing with their new network.

Please, telecom regulators, can we have some more?