Whispernets

Two weeks ago I gave Amazon's Kindle a number of thumbs down, the truth is I still stand by what I initially said... The Kindle has been completely unprepared for European market. Today, however, I would like to focus on one, in my opinion very important piece of the Kindle puzzle - the Whispernet.

Whispernet is a virtual mobile data network. Amazon uses the Whispernet to silently, automagically deliver digital content (books and other stuff) to Kindles. Initially, in the first and second generation Kindles, the Whispernet has been based on Sprint's CDMA network. This was the main technical reason why Kindles were not offered outside USA, as CDMA in practice does not support international roaming. The third generation Kindles (the international ones) use GSM - based Whispernet, so they are able to roam abroad.

Unfortunately we still have absolutely ridiculous GSM data roaming prices. Anywhere on the Planet subscribers get virtually unlimited data plans for $10-$20 a month. But as soon as they cross a border, they get charged like $10 a megabyte, almost three orders of magnitude higher. Certainly Amazon must have had negotiated a much better international data roaming for their Whispernet, but still it costs them dearly, as they decided to deliver magazines stripped of images and block the Kindle's web browser. This will change in future, because the current roaming data rates will not stand... Sooner or later competition or regulators will force MNOs to lower their rates.

But despite the international roaming problem, the Whispernet is a brilliant idea. Because it is completely invisible to users. Nothing to configure. No PINs and no APNs. No DHCP settings and no passwords. Just turn it on and automagic takes over. And it is free. No contract, no bills. Well... sort of... True there is no free lunch ever, but the idea of the Whispernet is the wireless data delivery costs are buried in the price of digital content people buy. So we just pay for books, and they are delivered free of charge, worldwide. And we will never know what partner networks Amazon uses to reach the customers and what APN they connect to and what rate they pay per megabyte. That is the beauty. It just works and all the details are hidden.

Actually the Kindle's Whispernet is a second service of this kind I use. The first one has been Yanosik - the on-line driver's alerting system. Here again the idea was to hide all the complexity and deliver device and service as simple as possible. And the data transmission cost is again buried in the service subscription.

Looking forward we will experience a lot of other Whispernets emerging, silently enabling a number of devices and services. I can imagine the barrier now are MNOs, who can be difficult to negotiate the terms with. But as their generic voice and data revenues go down, they will be more flexible to deal with.

And I would not rule out Amazon itself offering whispernet as a service worldwide, bundled with their AWS/EC2 cloud services. As one can get a machine or a service like generic SQL database delivered in the cloud / rental model, it will be quite natural for them to offer worldwide virtual mobile data connectivity to their cloud services. This would be a remarkably bold and game changing move. Suddenly delivering vertical applications based on mobile data services worldwide would be as easy as never before...