Evan Schuman's StorefrontBacktalk

The challenge gets even more complex. The most important segment of the M-Commerce target audience are Gen-Y consumers, who are notorious for having little patience. They also put a lot of emphasis on first impressions.

Together, that spells trouble. If the first M-Commerce rollouts work well in the labs and limited trials, they will likely be launched chainwide. But if they’re popular, the performance could quickly plummet under the massive bandwidth weight. That will alienate consumers and make it an order of magnitude more difficult to move to the next phase or even maintain momentum.

The nirvana safe approach would be to wait until the infrastructure—in this case, the carrier’s networks—are strong enough to handle even an extremely successful launch. But how big is that? The same networks that have to handle all of the traffic from Sears and Macy’s also have to handle all of the bandwidth traffic from hundreds of other large retailers.

Even worse, smaller retailers—especially specialized chains—might even get into M-Commerce more quickly than their big brothers because they have less overhead and can deploy more quickly, if they want to. The situation is a little different with M-Commerce than with the AT&T/iPhone mess because there will be more like a half-dozen or more carriers involved, but that could be negated because there will be so many more retailers and consumers interested.

And there is not merely an M-Commerce online problem. All of those in-store mobile efforts—ranging from 2-D barcode, NFC, texting special offers to in-store customers and price comparison to mobile coupons, using phone-as-CRM and true mobile payments—will also make a ton of bandwidth demands.

Technically, those in-store efforts could be partially offset by having in-store customers riding atop the store’s network, but that’s unlikely for both security and logistical reasons as well as the practical matter of getting a customer to take the time to do it. They’ll likely strongly prefer to just use their existing carrier’s network. That lack of trust will go both ways.

In other words, there is the not-so-unrealistic possibility of a huge amount of traffic. Forget not that every interactive multimedia communication takes up a heck of a lot more bandwidth than a simple page download. Maybe AT&T’s pleas that there was no way that it could have been expected to anticipate their bandwidth tsunami is not so unreasonable?

Perhaps, but now that it’s happened, consumers are going to be much less likely to be forgiving a second time. Alas, just what the M-Commerce community needs: yet another reason to indefinitely delay M-Commerce deployment.