Sidecut Reports

Editor’s note: The following is an excerpt from our most recent Sidecut Report, The Mobile Data Explosion, an in-depth look at the reasons behind the recent surge in wireless data usage, and where devices, networks and service plan charges are headed in the near future. The following excerpt takes a look at the reasons behind the recent surge of data usage, and why it caught even the biggest service providers by surprise. (To download your free copy of the report, click here.)

WHY IT HAPPENED NOW

How did such a shift in data usage catch an experienced provider like AT&T so unaware? Part of the blame might be the fact that there was a sort of perfect storm hitting the mobile data arena the past few years, radical shifts that might have been manageable had they happened alone — but hard to predict or plan for when they happened all at once. The introduction of “superphones” like the iPhone, combined with faster wireless broadband speeds and new addictive applications like Facebook and Twitter gave people the ability and reason to increase data use rapidly — far beyond than what had ever been seen before.

“AT&T is managing [wireless data] volumes no one else has experienced,” CTO John Donovan told the Wall Street Journal in an interview regarding the stress caused by the iPhone.

Why did the iPhone change the wireless data game so radically? When it was first made available to the public in June of 2007, the most paradigm-shifting thing about the iPhone was its touchscreen interface, an innovation that eliminated keyboard buttons in favor of a screen that was immediately much larger and sharper than that of any previous handheld device.

While the touchscreen was in and of itself a cool toy — making its users easily identifiable as iPhone owners with their telltale finger swipes — the combination of a larger screen size and an advanced browser was the real game-changer, providing for the first time an interface that could mimic a full-page website with enough clarity to make iPhone-version applications immediately understandable.

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Welcome to the first in a planned series of video “snacks” — call ‘em Sidecut Snacks — short, tasty bits of information for your viewing pleasure. In our first snack we highlight a couple quick takes from Sprint Nextel CEO Dan Hesse and Clearwire CEO Bill Morrow from their back-to-back keynote appearances at the CTIA 2010 show in Las Vegas on March 24. The topic: WiMAX networks, and the ecosystem that Sprint and Clearwire are building around their nascent national network. Enjoy!

It looks like Comcast’s plans to expand availability of its video content to the web is gaining more fans, and fans who count — namely the networks and broadcasters who put out the kind of content folks want to watch.

As Chris Albrecht notes over at NewTeeVee, CBS and a host of others have signed on to Comcast’s OnDemand Online (or TV Everywhere) idea, making the service more compelling even before it really launches. As we noted earlier, the combination of a vetted online way to watch the cable content you already pay for may be worth its weight in gold to Comcast as a customer-retention scheme. Throw in some low-cost WiMax as an access method and video everywhere starts to sound like an attractive possibility — which means of course here in California we will eventually have to pass a law that prohibits live streaming while driving.

But for content owners and service providers, that will be a good problem to have to solve.