Are the Telcos a Fraud on Smartphones?
I have been watching the major Telecommunications companies, who are busy selling consumers on the future of mobile computing, with their sales agents pocketing a hefty up-front commission for locking consumers into those three year contracts. On the other hand, they are doing diddly-squat to help businesses deliver to an ever-more-mobile audience.
A year ago I attended a programming workshop on Creating Mobile Apps, sponsored by Rogers, Bellm and Calgary Technologies Inc (now Innovate Calgary). After two hours of presentations of possibilities and opportunities, I went to each of the sponsors' websites, to see if they had a mobile version, and if they had “auto-detect” (show mobile versions to smartphone browsers, and desktop versions to all others), I found that none, did. I asked them about that, and why these multi-billion dollar corporate sponsors could not do what they were telling all small independent software developers to do? They all sheepishly fled from the stage.
Apparently, nothing has changed over the past year.
Actual sceen captures of the Telco websites as seen on an Apple iPhone on Jnuary 9, 2012. Look how mobile-ready the companies are themselves.
Here. You try it:
If you are looking at this on your desktop, cut and paste the above URLs into an email to your smartphone (typically to your own email address) and click on the links there, and compare the screens you see!
And it gets worse form there…. Because Telcos can’t do what Victoria Secret [
http://VictoriaSecret.com – try the above exercise with that URL] can, they are providing sub-standard business web hosting to all their businesses. They are promising consumers a future that neither they, nor any businesses hosted on their systems, CANNOT DELIVER.
And, I doubt that Victoria actually has a secret! Because
www.FoundLocally.com has done auto-detect on our servers.
Are Canadian Telecom Providers THAT FAR behind?
The Wireless Communications Age is not here if you are a Canadian business hosted with a Canadian Telco.
If you do not push them, or CHANGE YOUR HOSTING, you will be crushed by competitors hosted on much more nimble providers
I just got off the phone with Telus’s tech support call center, trying to help a friend and client with their mobile web site. The answer I got for setting up an “m.” subdomain and having their servers auto-detect mobile users as, “we can’t do that”. All we wanted was to create the sub-domain, aliasing to an existing /mobile sub-directory (which users shouldn’t be forced to type), and apply an autodtect scrip using .htaccess (this hosting was on a linux hosting platform, NT hosting redirects are handled differently)
I have nothing against Telus’s tech support call center staff, which is always excellent, and their call centre has assisted me with dozens of client hosting issues over the past 15 years. But THIS is getting ridiculous!
Small Business Insists on a Full-Service Web Hosting Solution
I let them know that they need to resolve this, so their business hosting clients can have a mobile sub-domain (typically m. or mobi. and have their web users automatically redirected to the most appropriate browsers. HEY! Half the browsers in the world now are either smartphones or tablets. Anything less than perfect domains & smartphone auto-detection is unacceptable!
It’s time for Canadian businesses to insist on competitive hosting solutions. I have given the Telcos a week to respond.
On FRIDAY JANUARY 13th, I will post a list of all the domains hosted by Telus, for other hosting providers and web designers to pillage. I will give each of the other providers a weeks’ notice as well to provide appropriate hosting for their corporate hosting clients as well.
If Telus, and each of the large business hosting providers, cannot do their job, they deserve to lose business. The ability to setup subdomains for mobile sites,and set up auto-detect scripts is something any large or small hosting provider can do (Google it, it's easy!). Losing corproate hosting business will have a very large impact on their stock price. Suits, are you listening?
Game-On!
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