Defining open mobile

There's no doubt mobile operators, led by Verizon Wireless, are opening up their networks. But is that enough to guarantee success in a world where Apple, Google and an array of app upstarts are competing for their share of the stage? Battles are intensifying between developers wanting to take advantage of the new capabilities of increasingly powerful 3G networks and carriers needing to maintain control over their expensive 3G investments. Mobile operators have always dictated what services and what applications would run over their networks — they picked and sold the devices, billed the customer and maintained the "walled garden," those restricted portals that became the sole outlet for apps and services for the vast majority of subscribers. Developers and over-the-top-service providers — led increasingly in recent days by Google — wanted to see a mobile data universe that more closely resembled the wired Internet, where customers were free to choose the provider of their individual services and developers could get their apps on any network.