A response to Franco

Whenever there is an interesting article, a lot of debate is generated, Nico had the following to say...

Just a point of note - what carrier is used by BlackBerry? GPRS of course. Blackberry, when deploying their solutions into networks and countries will also take the responsibility to set up the various (including GPRS) configurations. Given that they own the device, the OS, the software and all the back-end stuff (i.e. BES servers etc), not taking responsibility for the configurations would mean effective suicide for their company and the BB brand. This they have done extremely well and hence why BB has grown as much.

Having choice and variety in life also means certain downside aspects such as having to take ownership for configuring systems. For example, can the WiFi hotspot owner be held responsible for every manufacturer's laptop and what drivers they use for WiFi cards in whatever configurations - of course not. Hence why companies such as iPass will be around to make a business of solving some of these issues.

As far as I know Vodafone has no ownership of a GSM operator in France (busy confirming). Given that we have travelled to the UK (Vodafone), Germany (D2) I seem to recall that I had to do absolutely NO configuration changes for GSM, GPRS and 3G - it work out-of-the-box! Is this not Vodafone stable taking the ball and try and ensure smooth, seamless operation going from one Vodafone operator to another without having to make changes and raising the ire of people? This is in many ways compatible to what BB is doing except that Vodafone is having to buy stakes in other companies compared to BB selling a service.

How does Vodafone try and ensure this seamless operation; it starts by being able to write to every Vodafone stable SIM card all the Vodafone related systems settings etc. In addition, through Vodafone Internatiional, work will also be done to ensure systems are configured and set up in a manner which strives to give consistent operation.