I am frustrated at the mobile carriers in Canada (lack of) speed of innovation. There is a saying that an Internet year is like 3-4 months long because of how rapidly things change. The speed of a telco year is 3-4 YEARS long. I’ve outlined a few suggestions for Canada’s national carriers Telus, Bell, Rogers, and Globalive.
Will voice plans be a free service soon?
No, not soon.
But maybe it will come in the future when a carrier’s business model is based on advertising, and that advertising comes at the end of each call. (Globalive + MyScreen)
After all, they will want to encourage you to use that phone so they can serve more ads, right?
How much Bandwidth is enough?
4G networks are absolutely necessary as carriers move from a subscriber based biz model to a relevant advertising based models or anything in between.
I need more bandwidth on my mobile as my PC becomes more neglected.
I want to pay less on my bill and get more, and I don’t mind giving attention to relevant ads to do that.
More bandwidth means more fun and less frustration for customers
Customer Care
Give your Reps the tools to pass on account info to other departments when a customer care call is transferred.
It’s more than just annoying to need to reiterate your phone number, postal code and DOB, every time they transfer a call.
Faster more efficient service = Happier customers
Let me access my bills from my handset. See Mobile Website.
Audio services
I want to to access my voicemail and all call data visually from my handset, tag it, store it, forward it. Let me do this from a browser too. (@timoreilly’s idea)
Let people send me voice mail over the internet straight to my audio inbox.
Push-to-talk – I want push-to-talk to work like instant messaging does. ex. Availability settings
Send audio msg – make it easy to just record an audio message on the handset and send it to an audio inbox. I don’t want to deal with people in real time ALL the time. I want the audio version of a SMS.
Preloaded Applications
Preload each handset with the applications that suit that device.
Provide a portal (or marketplace) that lists all these apps for easy download straight onto the handset…and update it regularly!
Present only the apps that are available for the handset that is visiting the portal.
Photos – Flickr, Photobucket, Picasa, etc
Videos – YouTube, Blip.tv, DailyMotion, etc
Barcode scanner – see my post on Hyperlinks in the real world
Social Apps – Facebook, Twitter, etc
Deals Channel
Create an application that allows customers to browse through all the adverts that are relevant to them in terms of where they are at that time and their interests. If you do this right you can make both advertisers and customers very happy and make a lot of money in the process.
Mobile Website
Make a mobile version of your website. I want to be able to see my bill and offers for upgrades. Why do mobile carriers have crappy mobile websites?
If there is a portal page which is preloaded into favourites on the handset, make sure that page is current and useful for that device. I don’t need links to the BBC and CBC desktop websites. They are not mobile friendly.
