By J. Gerry Purdy on 9/1//2010  

I’m sure the first reaction to this week’s column title caught your attention.  You might even have asked, “Is this guy losing it or what?”  While my family figured that out a long time ago, there’s a very important message in the title, but it needs some explanation. 

The fact that the Web no longer matters seems counterintuitive.  The World Wide Web (which gives us the front portion of the name of most websites – ‘www’) has become the center of the digital universe.  Every organization and many individual people have built or will build websites, and that’s certainly going to continue for many years. 

Why the Web no longer matters is that more and more of us (and millions of machines that communicate as well) won’t ever directly access the Web any longer.  Instead, we’ll access something else that provides us with the information we want -- and that intermediary will access the old, traditional Web.  Others are coming to the same conclusion.

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Mobile Musings Mobile Musing is written  monthly by Tom Wheeler, Managing Director ath Core Capital Partners in Washington, DC.  Tom was the past CEO of the CTIA.  Dr. Purdy and Tom are professional friends and agreed to post Tom’s column on the MobileTrax web site each month.

By Tom Wheeler on 7/10/2010

The decision to go to usage-based pricing for wireless data appears to have returned rational thought to mobile pricing. Now do we need to keep thinking anew and find a different way to keep score?

In a mobile data world, why is ARPU relevant? The “U” in ARPU – users – has pretty much crested. With five billion “U’s” in the world and 285 million in the U.S. (out of a population of 310 million) the people saturation point has been reached for all practical purposes. The benchmark CTIA Wireless Industry Survey, it should be noted, measures “connections” rather than “subscribers” (since one subscriber can have multiple connections) and some carriers have even begun to break out non-traditional “connections” in their reporting.
 
The nature of a wireless connection is changing in a manner that will challenge the concept of a “User” even further. Forecasters tell us there will be 50 billion (or more) wirelessly connected devices in the next few years. From machine-to-machine (M2M) communications, to health monitors that look like a big Band-Aid but transmit vital signs, to carpets that know and report if there is an intruder or if an older person keeps falling down. There will be so many wirelessly connected microprocessors that some have started calling it “digital dust.”

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