National Championship War Game: The Battle for the Wireless Internet Press Summary

Nation’s Top Business Schools Predict Slow Rollout of Wireless Internet, Top Carriers Likely to Resist Opening Networks from FCC 700MHz Auction

Cambridge, MA (March 6, 2008) – The FCC 700MHz wireless spectrum auction will produce deal-making with lots of cash changing hands but only small near-term tech advances as far as the consumer is concerned, according results from a The Battle for the Wireless Internet war game run by Fuld & Company, the nation’s leader in competitive intelligence.

Held at the historic American Academy of Arts & Sciences in Cambridge, Mass., the institution where Alexander Graham Bell first demonstrated the telephone in 1876, students assumed the identities of companies in the 21st century wireless internet space, including:

• University of Chicago Graduate School of Business – Google
• Northwestern’s Kellogg School of Management - Intel
• Harvard Business School – AT&T Mobility
• MIT’s Sloan School of Management – Vulcan Capital

Teams worked to predict corporate strategies that may follow the upcoming FCC auction closing. They concluded that the industry will be hard-pressed to build out the infrastructure needed to enhance consumer benefits in the next two-to-three years.

Kellogg’s team, representing Intel, won the war game contest based on four criteria: its strategic insight, accuracy in presenting Intel’s strategy, creative ways it expressed Intel’s vision in the wireless Internet space, and, finally, its ability to project its strategic vision into the future.

War Game Predictions included:

• Intel will likely enter the landscape through the backdoor by helping PC makers get into the handset business. Rather than try to push an equivalent Intel Inside® theme to the handset companies – an action that will likely be resisted because of the “chip tax” these companies would absorb, Intel will work their way into the WiMax space through the PC world (a market Intel already dominates) as the two spaces converge.
  

• Google will do “a little evil” and partner with AT&T (or possibly one of the other one of the phone carriers not represented in the game; Verizon is a second likely choice) by forming an exclusive but time-limited agreement, similar to the AT&T-iPhone deal. In turn, AT&T will open its network to other handheld devices and applications, breaking down the “walled garden” that the major carriers currently have in place. In exchange, the student team suggested that Google will share 20% of its advertising revenue with the carrier.
  

• Adult content may become the “killer app” for launching the wireless Internet. As suggested by one of the judges in response to team discussions on applications, adult content is already a significant presence on the Internet and will likely have the same effect on the wireless Internet when launched.
  

• Google’s roll-out of Android will run into stiff resistance on the part of mobile phone manufacturers because Google and handset producers have opposing views of the wireless future. Traditional handset manufacturers (led by companies such as Nokia and chip companies, such as Intel) will resist Google’s march towards open-source and open development based on its Android platform. Intel and mobile phone manufactures believe that they can only make money by selling feature-rich, memory-rich phones. Simple phones are commodities. Google’s Android and its cloud computing concept moves data and operating software away from the devices and onto the network (closer, of course, to Google’s ad-serving machine).
  

Following an initial round, Fuld introduced a disruptive scenario. The future scenario, dated May 6, 2008 (post-auction), involved Sprint Nextel teaming up with DirectTV owner and former cable TV wheeler and dealer, John Malone, WiMax company Clearwire, and the newly minted Microsoft-Yahoo! to form the first truly wireless Internet joint venture. The pressure of imminent competition from this fictional scenario forced all four teams to grapple with both their limitations and the reality of their vision for the future.

Fuld & Company, a global leader in competitive intelligence, has facilitated war games for companies around the world. These are typically private, closed-door sessions for executives needing to make critical decisions. The Fuld-run Battle for the Wireless Internet was a public event held on March 4, 2008 in Cambridge, Massachusetts at the American Academy of Arts & Sciences.