3G iPhone coming in 60 days?

According to a blurb from CNET, The Wall Street Journal's technology columnist Walt Mossberg predicted last week that the 3G iPhone will hit store shelves within 60 days.

Mossberg made the comments at an executive summit held by Beet.tv. Most of his talk is about how broadband networks in the U.S. are lacking compared to other developed countries, and how that's a big problem for video-over-the-Internet businesses.

Mossberg is part of a select group that gets early access to important Apple products, and he was one of the first to review the initial iPhone last June.

Broadband Penetration

The Movaya team has been heads down on 2008 business planning the past week so we haven't had much time to spend on blog posts but one announcement this week that is important to our business and the overall mobile content space, was T-Mobile USA's CEO Robert Dotson announcing that the carrier will spend about $10 billion between 2007 and 2009 for 2G and 3G network deployments.

For those of you not familiar with the terms "2G" and "3G", these stand for Second Generation and Third Generation wireless networks. First generation (1G) were analog while 2G and 3G networks are digital. 3G technologies enable network operators (wireless carriers like AT&T, Verizon, T-Mobile) to offer users a wider range of more advanced services while achieving greater network capacity. Services include wide-area wireless voice telephony and broadband wireless data up to 5-10 Mb per second.

T-Mobile is the last of the four big US carriers to deploy 3G. AT&T Wireless was the first to roll out a true 3G network in the US back in 2004 and today Sprint, Verizon and AT&T have (pretty much) nationwide 3G services.

Why is broadband wireless important? Well, if you're currently on a broadband connection on your desktop, you probably already know the answer. If you're still on dial-up at home, one analogy I can use is to think of highway traffic. As a Seattelite, we experience some of the worst traffic in the country. Dial-up is like driving in traffic during rush-hour where it is not uncommon to take over an hour to go under 10 miles on our highways. Broadband, however, is like driving on the same highway in the middle of the night when there is no traffic.

In the US, the total number of homes with wireline broadband has grown to over 70 million over the last 6 years. This broadband adoption has been one of the biggest drivers of the Internet growth. Companies and websites like Youtube, Real.com and iTunes would have a tough time existing without broadband.

So for companies like Movaya, that are in the mobile content space, wireless broadband adoption is an important component. Without broadband, downloading games and applications to your cellphone would be painstakingly slow and consumers simply wouldn't do it.

So, in the US, what are the numbers for 3G adoption? Take a look at the chart we put together at the top of this post. The blue bars represent the number of wireline broadband subscribers in the US and the red bars represent the number of wireless broadband subscribers in the US.

There are approximately 250 million total wireless subscribers in the US (at the end of 2007) and an estimated 50 million of them are already on 3G. So in the 3 years since 3G was first deployed in the US, you already have almost as many wireless broadband subscribers (50 million) in the US that you had after six years in the wireline broadband space (70 million). Fast forward a few years out and you'll have hundreds of millions of US consumers with a broadband connection with them wherever they are.

The Movaya team is ready to take advantage of this HUGE opportunity. If you want to discuss your plans to take advantage of this, drop us a line.