As part of my PhD work at Cornell, I get to hang out with folks from Science and Technology Studies and Information Science. Both groups are very interested in how various parties, and in particular “users” affect the development of technologies. Case and point: the Model T.
When Ford introduced the Model T, a significant number of rural adopters found a novel use for the car – as a “mobile” engine for powering farm equipment. As the illustration above depicts, farmers would jack the car up, remove the rubber tire and attach the wheel to various crank driven machinery. 3rd party vendors even sold kits to help adapt the car for this type of use (in modern terms they were jailbreaking the Model T) – at least until Ford Motors cracked down on this application.
The moral of this example: the way users use technology can vary greatly from the way the creators imagined it should be used.
So how does this tie into a discussion on eReading?
As I’ve posted a number of times, pree iPad Steve Jobs, as late as two years ago, was holding firm to the idea that people didn’t read anymore, and even if they did, the iPhone wasn’t a reading platform. In 20/20 hindsight this may seem like an odd position, especially with the launch of iBooks and the iPad. But at the time it made some sense. Seriously, who would read on a device with a tiny LCD screen that consumed a lot of power?
Well, as it turns out, iPhone users, especially those who had a daily commute, would.
Like the Model T and farm equipment, there were outside factors that influenced how people used the technology.
First, for most people, the iPhone was a replacement device; by that I mean that it probably wasn’t a “gateway” cellphone for most people. While it might have been their first smartphone, the vast majority of users had already integrated a cellphone into their daily rhythms. They were used to carrying that sort of device with them wherever they went. And, more importantly, they were used to routinely charging it (we’ll get back to that latter point in a moment).
These same people had also grown accustom to the notion of using a phone to help pass downtime (waiting in line, at the doctor’s office, and, most importantly, on commutes). In fact, cell phone providers have been touting this as a “feature” of cellphones since the early 2000’s (apps as a revenue stream predate the iPhone). So iPhone users did what you might expect – they used their phones to “kill time.” And the best way to kill time was to explore the App Store.
As mentioned previously, ¾’s of the apps downloaded from the store are free ones. And, not surprisingly, most (if not all) of the eReaders available on the App store are free. So, people began to download reading apps. And, while projected text (as opposed to the reflective eInk surface of the Kindle) is “harder” on most folks the eyes, when content is begin read for limited periods at a time (say on a commute), people didn’t notice the strain (especially when there were convenient, multi-touch zoom in and out controls).
Likewise, while an LCD consumes far more power than an eInk display, people had integrated routine charging of the phone into their daily routine (see, I told you I’d get back to it – this, by the way is why, even though LCDs consume far more power than eInk, eInk isn’t going to win on its power efficiency). And they did it regardless of if they had read or not.
Thus common wisdom about reading on an iPhone (or other smartphone) was proved wrong.
The lesson here is that people use technology in unexpected ways. And the unexpected ways that they use technology have unintended consequences on other technologies. Nothing operates in a vacuum. As the cliché goes, a pebble dropped in one end of the pool can case ripples (if not waves) in the other end. So let’s discuss a potential downside to these mobile technologies.
Data Strain
While smartphone and the apps that run on them may change our expectations about what “technology” should do, they have lost of unintended effects. In June of 2009 AT&T revealed that the average iPhone user consumes upwards of 400MB of voice/data bandwidth a month. That is significantly more traffic than AT&T is used to providing. In fact, according to AT&T, 3% of smartphone users, primarily iPhone owners, are responsible for 40% of total data usage on the network. If you’ve been to a major US city and experience poor quality on your iPhone, this is part of the reason.
This isn’t just a problem with AT&T. As more feature and app rich phones (and tablets) come online with different companies (for example the Nexus One and Droid on Verizon) networks are going to become increasingly stressed by data demands. And, at least as of this writing, US cell phone providers are not quite sure how to keep up with the demand.
Typically smartphones require subscribers to sign up for both a voice and a data plan from their cell phone providers. Current carriers offer a variety of tiered data plans, ranging from a few megabytes a month to unlimited data transfers. Typically customers are “nicely” pushed toward the more costly unlimited data plans. However, carriers are beginning to discover that consumers are more than capable of consuming unlimited data and more.
The problem that US carriers are facing is that their existing infrastructure is not prepared for load that unlimited data use puts on it. AT&T’s recent network issues in cities like New York have been directly tied to the overwhelming amount of wireless data transfers taking place. As more and more devices rely on mobile networks for internet access, this problem is only going to increase.
To date, the networks have responded in three ways. First, new cellphone plans require a larger amount of cell phone subscribers (including non-smartphone users) to sign up for basic data plans. The second move is to create a number of tools to “politely” inform users of the amount of bandwidth that they are consuming. This is directly tied to the final move: AT&T and Verizon are beginning to float (or perhaps threaten) the elimination of unlimited data plans.
And that was before this:
Not only is there a tension between users and cell providers, but, there’s also one between the providers and equipment manufacturers. Take for example Steve Job’s rhetoric during the announcement was that of a “breakthrough deal” with AT&T allowing unlimited network access for $29.99 a month. Thus Apple positions itself as the good guy, fighting for better data rates. The question remains, how will the influx of new users tax the existing networks (and potentially lead to everyone else paying higher data prices to make up for the difference).
Either way, there’s a message from Apple and Google to USE THAT 3G NETWORKING at the same time AT&T and Verizon are taking actions that say “but not too much.”
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