Punching holes in wireless data's walled garden content strategy When Rafael Boza stepped in front of a crowded room on a snowy December day in Chicago, he delivered a presentation that might be considered heretical to some carriers. Lucky for Boza, there wasn't a single carrier representative in the audience of 50 or so attending the third annual Cap Gemini Ernst & Young RealTime Wireless seminar, which attracted a mix of IT managers, chief information officers and other upper-level executives from end-user organizations.

Boza, vice president of the telecommunications, networks and media group for Cap Gemini Ernst & Young, focused most of his discussion on how corporations can use wireless technology to improve efficiencies. At the same time, Boza attacked what was once thought to be sacred for carriers: the walled garden approach of providing content to users.

Under the walled garden strategy, users are only given access to a set of content headings such as news, traffic, weather and sports contained on the service providers' servers. The carrier in turn generates revenue through advertising on these "most favored" sites.

"The idea of the walled garden comes from a philosophy of regulation or control," Boza said. "The idea is of inclusion, and the RBOCs and wireless carriers have this view that if they provide everything the customer needs, there's no need for them to go anywhere else."

That thinking is fundamentally flawed, he said, because most users eventually want to wander. "The RBOCs' [wired] ISPs tried to provide the portal experience," said Boza, who was once a Bell Atlantic executive. "I think over time they realized that was a failed experiment. Even if you go to the biggest portal today, which is AOL, you do some things, but eventually you go somewhere else."

The walled garden approach initially succeeded in Japan - and to a lesser extent in Europe - by giving early adopters a library of content. However, as more Web sites are equipped with wireless front ends, carriers have started adopting an approach that lets users decide where to get information.

"It's very analogous to the early days of AOL when AOL gave you all the pretty colors but also gave you a doorway, if you wanted, to the wild and wooly world of the Web," said Ben Linder, vice president of marketing for Openwave, a wireless data infrastructure vendor. "I believe everything is evolving to a modification of this second approach."

Some wireless carriers are starting to offer a combination of content strategies. AT&T's Digital PocketNet service comes in three varieties: a free option that gives users access to bookmarked sites, a $6.99 per month choice that gives users some roaming capability and a $14.99 per month option that lets users roam to virtually any site.

That strategy, while covering different potential user groups, must evolve with the market, which will demand more sophisticated services, including access to corporate applications, Boza said.

"The next challenge that [carriers] face is how do they manage that new product," he said. "The battle still remains for the customer. And then you're connecting content and applications with the customer."

Content providers feel that carriers are best served by getting out of the content business and acting as a conduit for consumers.

"[Consumers] already have brand loyalties to online products," said Eric Engleman, director of Excite Mobile, which has migrated its content to the Palm platform and to handsets distributed by AT&T. "Over time, carriers will need to balance the desire for consumers to get access to content and the desire of carriers to control customers' movement."

That evolutionary path, if followed, will require carriers to become keepers of content directories, but not the content itself.

"The idea of creating the walled garden, whether it's a wireless carrier trying to control the first four lines of the WAP screen or a wired portal, is going to run into the same problem and cause the same impediments," Boza said. "The battle is not for controlling the content, but the battle is for having the user experience and managing the customer. Originally [walled gardens] were purely a retention strategy, but the world is too diverse."