3G to Web 2.0? Can Mobile Telephony Become an Architecture of Participation? Jason Wilson University of Luton, UK Abstract / Telecommunications companies (telcos) paid too much for European 3G licences on the basis that they would be able to reach mobile consumers directly with web content. The subse- quent reluctance of consumers to pay for commercial content and the debts and devaluations afflicting the post-tech-boom telcos has had several consequences. Besides an undercapitalized 3G infrastructure, there has been increasing consternation about the absence of a must-have service ‘killer app’ that would lead to the uptake of 3G products, and determined efforts to find one, as evidenced at events like ‘Mobile Content World’, an industry conference and trade fair held in London in October 2005. But the efforts to sell 3G spectrum (and the entire 3G experiment) may be based on a misapprehension of the nature of users’ relationships with ICTs and web content. This article presents an overview and commentary on the progress of the 3G mobile content industry. In part it is based on a review of presentations at ‘Mobile Content World’, and in part on a review and synthesis of the most recent literature covering 3G and mobile content from the fields of media studies, cultural studies, economics and business. Key Words / 3G mobiles / mobile content / mobile telephones / user-generated content / web 2.0 Introduction and Background In 2000, at the height of the ‘dotcom’ boom, telecommunications companies (telcos) in European markets paid too much for third generation mobile telephony (3G) spectrum licences. 3G describes a range of telephone protocols (UMTS, cdma2000 and more) that transmit and receive data at speeds over the threshold at which certain kinds of mobile internet experiences become possible, such as audio, image and video downloads, streaming data, online gaming and so on: Third generation (3G) wireless networks . . . offer faster data transfer rates than current networks. The first generation of wireless (1G) was analog cellular. The second generation (2G) is digital cellular, featuring integrated voice and data communications. So-called 2.5G networks offer incremental Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies Copyright © 2006 Sage Publications London, Thousand Oaks & New Delhi 1354-8565 Vol 12(2): 229–242 DOI: 10.1177/1354856506066122 http://cvg.sagepub.com FEATURE REPORT