I am a frequent reader of John Strand’s reports.  He’s a guy who has analyzed the European mobile market inside out and stuck with his often fairly controversial views and proven that he’s right.  One of his ‘babies’ is mobile value added service and the other one distribution strategies.  Both areas are extremely well-developed in Europe.  John pointed out in his 2007 market predictions that the MVNO market will boom in Europe and it did.  Europe is moving towards increasing efficiency in distribution – that means brands must be enabled to play an  effective role in selling mobile services.In the US market there are plenty of factors that could create a booming market for MVNOs: large population, (relatively) homogeneous culture and language base and so forth.  But the carrier technology fragmentation has permanently crippled the market from achieving European efficiencies in distribution and VAS differentiation.  Take the example of Sonopia:  a promising model of enabling brands to launch their own mobile services is struggling because the market is not educated to navigate the complex technological environment and changing carriers is cumbersome.  The US market would be perfect for their micro-segmentation approach but I am afraid it will take 5-7 years before the technological base of the market has been harmonized and consolidated to a point where infrastructure services can be offered to service provider layer in a competitive fashion.