I spotted over on Mobile Crunch that RIM’s CEO – Mike Lazaridis – “started horking about conserving bandwidth, just like AT&T’s CEO“:

“Manufacturers had better start building more efficient applications and more efficient services. There is no real way to get around this.”
“If we don’t start conserving that bandwidth, in the next few years we are going to run into a capacity crunch. You are already experiencing the capacity crunch in the United States.”
“That is pretty fundamental to a carrier as that means you can have three paying Blackberry browsing customers for every one other customer.”
“That has a huge advantage for the carriers if you think about the many billions of dollars the carriers have invested over the last five years in spectrum auctions and infrastructure rollouts.”

What a strange thing to say – what’s he thinking?  Why…

• The manufacturers don’t build the services and applications that munch bandwidth, it’s the app community.
• The app community just doesn’t care.  What’s the point in making your app conserve bandwidth when 99.9999% of the other apps don’t?
• As with the internet, audio and (particularly) video will make all other bandwidth demands insignificant.  If your email application is bandwidth efficient you might save a few kbs, then someone next to you watches a video which sucks 500 MB/s.  And video is primarily driven by the available codecs and bit rates, rather than how beautifully the apps are built.
• Don’t fret – no one’s building apps for Blackberry anyway.

Let the networks worry about bandwidth requirements – because no one else will.