Despite lingering doubts over the channel opportunity for selling mobile data, key players in this market are preparing to steal the march on what is forecast to be a £1 billion market.

Ben Dowd, business sales director at O2 UK, says the channel is in a perfect position to take advantage of selling mobile data products. Resellers are able to exploit their trusted relationship with existing and potential customers to sell mobile data, Dowd believes. He stated: "The opportunity for the channel here is huge in terms of revenue. Gartner predicts that mobile data will be a £1 billion market in the UK by 2010."

Adrian Williams, head of T-Mobile's OEM and IT channel partners in the UK, says mobile data is a huge growth area for his business. The key area T-Mobile is focusing on is mobile broadband, particularly for notebooks. He comments on the opportunity for resellers: "It's natural for resellers to bring mobile into their propositions. Businesses are looking for applications to make themselves more efficient in their days to day activities. Mobile broadband is a nice, simple proposition to get resellers into this space, and it leads to other services such as VPNs and security. That means the reseller delivers greater value for customers, and they get more customer loyalty if they provide a good service."

"The opportunity for the channel in mobile data is huge in terms of revenue"

Marios Ktisti, Commercial Product Manager at Hugh Symons Telecom, stated: "The key is understanding these convergent, value added mobile devices. You need to understand the technology because they are IT-based and quite network related, so they need to be able to work on a network, together. This is about the coming together of the mobile phone dealer, the IT dealer, the PBX guy and the fixed line guy. That's how things are moving forward. If you're in the comms channel, you have to start looking at those different areas. A company that deals with all the convergent technologies is more appealing than a company that only deals with one."

However, not everyone agrees. Jess Thompson-Hughes, Managing Director at React Technologies, damningly states: "As Managing Director of my company, I wouldn't want to resell this or use it yet. But if I had a shop in the high street selling handsets, I would definitely sell it to consumers. This is a nice idea, but operators will want to oversubscribe people to mobile data packages like crazy, then there will be problems with contention ratios and a lot more. The areas they will be quiet about are where it works, the capacity and the contention ratio."

Brendon Cross, Managing Director at STL, agrees that mobile data is not yet at the level required for solid business use. "There is a lack of service level agreements, guarantees of speed and the like at the moment," he says. "But I have no doubt whatsoever that this will be a huge market in maybe nine to 12 months when you can get SLAs on your phone. Mobile data is business ready now, as long as you're willing to accept that you might struggle with the consistency of service.

"Already we're seeing that the mobile phone is the business tool of choice. Whether we like it or not, people will use the path of least resistance. The guy in the sales office will use his mobile to dial a customer instead of his desk phone, because the customer's number is in his mobile, and people will go online using their smart phone because it's easier than firing up a laptop."

Yet Thompson-Hughes reminds us that mobile data is nothing new. He says mobile operators are dressing an established concept in new hype, and that the product really is not up to it. Thompson-Hughes explains: "We sell GSM and WiFi dual mode handsets. WiFi works at 11MBps to 54MBps at the moment, but 802.11n, which is in draft two right now, will take that speed up to 300MBps. GSM providers don't like that as WiFi at that speed will take a lot of minutes off their networks. If they could make it so they could get high speed Internet access over GSM, from anywhere, with unlimited usage, network operators could put half the IT world out of a job.

"It's not like that though, but that's what they're trying to market, and telling people they can already do, now. The limitations of technology means you have a lot more marketing than actuality out there."

Cross sums up the potential and apparent inevitability of the burgeoning market for mobile data solutions: "We're selling mobile phones on packages connecting them to the telephone system. We're seeing a real upsurge in information management application sales, so if you follow that, why wouldn't the next step be to download data to that device or to use it to download data to your laptop?"