Brough Turner is a renowned telcom industry professional with a passion for mobile and a very smart guy. We recently interviewed him about the mobile web for a paper on cell phones in citizen media. What he said is useful for thinking about this in the context for social benefit, so we post it here for you, before the release of our report. We will also have a workshop on the role of the mobile web for social development at MobileActive08.
You asked me to elaborate on today's mobile web and how it will change with the advent of 3G networks. Here we go: Mobile phone networks provide the best telephony coverage in the world and, for more than a decade, mobile operators have had a "data" story. Unfortunately, the data side of mobile telephony has been slow, expensive and limited in what it can access.
