AT&T Chief Champions Cloud Computing, Mobile Broadband

BARCELONA - AT&T chief Randall Stephenson on Tuesday said that the next wave of growth in the wireless industry will be led by a combination of mobile broadband and cloud computing.

Leading the way in this space has been Amazon with its buy-it-once, read-it-anywhere approach on the Kindle, Stephenson said during a keynote here at Mobile World Congress. There are challenges, however, when it comes to video consumption.

"Right now, more than half of all tablet users are streaming video content. But this buy-it-once and access it everywhere model for video is proving to be slow to emerge," he said.

Stephenson cautioned video providers not to drag their feet. "We saw what happens in the music industry," he said. "If players ... are too slow to develop, the customer will develop a model around us. We as the eco-system have to come to grips with this."

Stephenson pointed to texting, which was originally a walled garden whereby users could only text people on the same network. Once interoperability was introduced, however, "demand just skyrocketed and created a business model for companies like Twitter."

The average customer is OS, device, and network agnostic, he said. They want something seamless and that's "a perfect example of how this cloud computing and mobile Internet are going to provide a very powerful force" for growth.

"There's a tidal wave coming ... that's being carried by these 4G networks and cloud computing environments," Stephenson said. "We as an industry can try to control this tide ... but customers are going to do what they want. Our objective is to create a seamless and open environment."

With this tidal wave comes the need for increased spectrum, Stephenson said, something the entire U.S. mobile industry has been requesting for years.

"Public policy makers are going to have to be very assertive" when it comes to spectrum, he said. Not surprisingly, he also backed a "light regulatory touch" and a predictable regulatory environment so that investments pay off.

"For many, it's not only a large investment but it's multi-year investments and the implication of that from a public policy standpoint [is that] as business people we don't want certainty but we need predictability," Stephenson said.