The Operator Perspective panel at the Mobile 2.0 Europe conference was a pretty heated up debate. At a point some members of the audience were going ape which, although entertaining as it may be to the outside observer, wasn't doing any service to those who were looking forward to a rational debate.

Still, there were some highlights that deserve a post-event debate, starting with Anastassia Lauterbach of T-Mobile who shed some light with regards to mobile bandwidth consumption:

• Youtube represents about 17% of all the traffic
• peer-to-peer generates 34% of all traffic (I'm not really sure of this number as I failed to jot it down, please feel free to correct me)

She asked if the audience could figure out these numbers in a pure rhetorical exercise, as an excuse for the tight control and lack of data plan innovation on behalf of mobile operators.

While I can understand her point, in my opinion this is something mobile operators brought upon themselves when they came up with the idea of the USB 3G dongle for the masses.

People aren't using P2P on their mobiles, starting with the fact that it'd kill their battery in no time, and Youtube isn't compatible enough with a large enough range of devices that would cause such high data consumption values.

What's generating all that traffic is people with laptops watching Youtube funny videos while they commute or others that plug the dongle onto a computer and want it to be a complete replacement for fixed broadband, which is a completely legitimate assumption as it is what is being marketed by mobile operators.

At the end of the day, data traffic generated by dongles cannot be used as an excuse for the lack of data plan pricing innovation, which is something that was already going on way before such devices became popular.

Another hot topic was that of tight operator control over what gets into the phone (and what it is allowed to do). This is more of a problem in the US than in Europe, as European MNO's are getting increasingly more open although we're not quite there yet. Still, the old excuse of "we are the ones who get support calls" is getting worn out as a recent market survey rates Nokia as the most popular mobile operator and I doubt Nokia gets a flood of support calls, or considers it a problem large enough to become pretty vocal on it, over 3rd-party applications installed on their devices.

Mind you, I don't doubt MNO's call centers get support calls for 3rd-party applications but I also don't believe that by exercising a tight control over what gets installed will reduce them to zero.

A question that was left unanswered was about whether or not the iPhone, and the high data consumptions done by their users, will become MNOs worst nightmare as they have zero control over what gets installed and must "compete" on flat-rate data pricing amongst themselves.

Conclusion

Both these issues, coupled together, prove Max Niederhofer, of Atlas Ventures, right when he says that operators wanting to get a piece of everything makes him, and other VCs, extremely wary of any serious investment in the mobile industry.

When comparing the mobile services/applications ecosystem with what happens on the Web, one has to admit innovation is, in fact, stifled. And this is the reason any open debate between mobile operators and 3rd-party developers will continue to be heated up for the foreseeable future.