⇥ Upheaval without wires

If you came here for advance information or predictions about Apple’s much discussed table, I am afraid I have neither. In fact, I am fairly sure that what I am about to tell you is unlikely to happen, so, there you are.

On the other hand, I have certain hopes for the product and one, in particular, is something that I haven’t seen anyone in the media discuss: could the Jesus Tablet revolutionize the way we buy and use wireless data?

Everyone agrees with the fact that the tablet will have some kind of 3G or 4G wireless cellular connectivity, but they all seem to take for granted that network access will be provisioned the same way it is done with the iPhone.

The tablet, however, is not a phone—quite the contrary—and, therefore, it’s perhaps a good idea to ask whether Apple may not be looking for ways to create an even more captive market.

To understand what the implications might be, one only needs look at the Kindle. It hasn’t occurred to me until recently that the killer feature of Amazon’s reader is not the e-ink screen, or the vast selection of books—it’s the fact that it makes accessing a cellular network completely seamless: there are no contracts for you to sign (except the one with Amazon), no data fees to pay (except the ones you pay to Amazon as part of your purchases) and—most importantly—no roaming fees to deal with.

In other words, even though it doesn’t look like one, the Kindle is a cell phone that works the world over through a single provider that is not your cellco. In fact, looking at Amazon’s recent announcement of its revised royalty scheme for the Kindle, you can see that they are planning to charge $0.15/MiB for data transfer, regardless of where the user is in the world. To put things in perspective, the lowest price that is available to me while roaming in the States is $1/MiB—and that’s if I pay a $10 monthly fee to get it reduced from $6/MiB, if I sign a long term agreement and if I agree to pay on top of my regular voice and data plan.

Compare this experience with the absolute hell that dealing with your current cellular company is, and you will see that there is an opportunity, for a sophisticated player, to create a wave of unprecedented disruption in the wireless market.

If Apple were to sell the tablet and make a data plan available through Apple, a number of really important things would happen:

• First, its users would become entirely captive—no messing around with third-party companies, subsidies, and the likes
• Second, a clueful company would, for the first time in history, be in control of a wireless experience end-to-end. Just like the iPhone’s killer feature is the App Store, this could be the tablet’s one defining characteristic
• Third, Apple’s immense buying power would bring costs down to a level that is going to be difficult to beat
• Fourth, the fact that it doesn’t look like a phone doesn’t mean that the tablet couldn’t work like one—and without pesky wireless companies dictating terms, no-one would prevent customers from installing Skype or a SIP client on their systems
• Fifth, Apple could easily integrate this service with others it already provides (MobileMe Data?)

The disruption of this approach would be nearly total: because customers purchase service from Apple, the underlying network provider becomes little more than a curiosity, and it’s not unthinkable for our friends from Cupertino to eventually set up their own global wireless network.

Of course, I have no illusion that it’s highly unlikely for any of this to happen—I mean, the wireless companies cannot possibly be so shortsighted to let this happen, right?

Right?

Image credit: Tablets by swimboy1