mMode

~ the last words ~

mMode was AT&T Wireless's second attempt at mobile data. The first was Pocketnet, built on CDPD, and it went nowhere. For the second attempt the company went to NTT DoCoMo, whose i-mode service had tens of millions of subscribers in Japan and was the only working proof that ordinary people would pay for a phone that did more than call. DoCoMo had already put $9.8 billion into AT&T Wireless in january 2001 for a sixteen percent stake, bought explicitly to bring an i-mode-shaped portal to the American market, so the partnership was not a difficult sell.

It launched on 16 april 2002 in about a dozen US markets, running on GPRS at first and moving up through the faster standards as the network got them. There were three price tiers, starting at $2.99 a month with data charged at two cents a kilobyte and topping out at $12.49 with two megabytes included. If you have not thought about a megabyte as a monthly allowance in a while, that is what the mobile web cost in 2002.

Inside it you got WAP-rendered versions of a handful of partner sites, an email address ending in @mmode.com, a shop for ringtones and wallpapers, and a feature called Find a Friend that located another subscriber by tower triangulation years before anyone thought that needed a privacy conversation. All of it lived behind the carrier's own menu. AT&T decided what was on the list and took a cut of anything sold through it.

This was US-only at the carrier layer, which is the layer that mattered, because the whole thing was a menu on a phone billed by an operator. Turkey had exactly the same object with a different name on it, sold by the local networks at a similar per-kilobyte price, and it died of the same thing. The carrier deck was never a product. It was a toll gate placed between a handset and the internet, and it only had value for as long as the handset could not get there by itself.

~ the record ~

~ the ad came first ~

In january 2002 unbranded billboards and television spots for something called mLife appeared across the United States with no explanation attached. There was a staged protest. Nobody watching knew what was being sold, and one popular reading was that it was a funeral or insurance campaign, because the word looked like a death notice.

The reveal came in a sixty second spot during Super Bowl XXXVI on 3 february 2002, made by Ogilvy and Mather: a sequence of belly buttons ending at a birth, the metaphor being an untethered life. MetLife then sued over the confusion with its own brand and the two settled after AT&T withdrew its trademark application. The product the campaign existed to launch was still ten weeks away from going on sale.

~ what you actually got ~

The mMode Music Store opened in october 2004 and it is the cleanest illustration of the era anyone could ask for. You browsed and bought a track on your phone and had it charged to your wireless bill. Then you went to a computer and downloaded the file there, because the phone could not play it. The purchase happened on the device and the music did not.

Find a Friend went the other way. It worked, it was genuinely ahead of its time, and Cingular removed it after the takeover. Locating a person by triangulating their handset against cell towers was a feature you could switch on in 2002 with a lot less ceremony than it would ever get again.

~ what replaced it ~

Cingular closed its $41 billion purchase of AT&T Wireless on 26 october 2004 and stopped signing anyone new up to mMode. The AT&T Wireless brand itself was retired the following april. What was left was a service with a fixed and shrinking population of users, still switched on, drifting through the arrival of the iPhone in 2007 on the network that had absorbed it. Access finally stopped in june 2010, six years after the last person joined.

The model did not die with it. A curated list of approved things you can buy on your phone, with the gatekeeper taking a percentage, is exactly the arrangement that won. The only thing that changed is who holds the gate. mMode's mistake was that a phone company was never going to be interesting enough to be the shop, and the moment a browser could reach any site at all, its entire reason to exist was a menu standing in the way.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »